Increasingly, colleges and universities have begun to recognize the potential of students who do not meet standard admissions criteria, or who, despite their talents and abilities, come from educational backgrounds that did not prepare them adequately for the rigors of higher education. As a result, many of these institutions use alternative…

In Leonard Koos's book, "The Junior-College Movement", he described the establishment of a junior college in an American public school district as the "culmination of the local school system", alluding to the prestige associated with having a junior college in a community. The best-known example of this arrangement was in…

The Texas Ten Percent Plan (TTP) provides students in the top 10 percent of their high-school class with automatic admission to any public university in the state, including the two flagship schools, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M. Texas created the policy in 1997 after a federal appellate court ruled that the state's previous…

Considering that achievement gaps have become a serious educational problem worldwide, the Ministry of Education in Taiwan has been addressing a series of policies to reduce achievement gaps, but the effect of these policies has not yet been carefully examined. Therefore, the present study investigated current educational policies, achievement gap…

A curriculum is a form of politics (Apple, 1993). The politics of a curriculum defines what is legitimate and valued and what is not. In Taiwan, the objectives of vocational high school (VHS) education are to prepare students to acquire relevant professional knowledge and practical skills and to integrate them into their future career development.…

This article aims to present the changes in student selection and placement examinations in secondary education by focusing on the geometry content during the postreform period. The methodology, also used by Petway (2000), includes three steps toward the aim of examining the following: technical aspects, content coverage, and examination results.…

The use of categorical dependent variables with the classical linear regression model (CLRM) violates many of the model's assumptions and may result in biased estimates (Long, 1997; O'Connell, Goldstein, Rogers, & Peng, 2008). Many dependent variables of interest to educational researchers (e.g., professorial rank, educational attainment) are…

The Education Commission of the States launched the Blueprint for College Readiness initiative to provide guidance and support to the growing number of states working to improve student success and transition from high school into postsecondary. Designed by state leaders for state leaders, the Blueprint features a menu of 10 critical policies…

This paper explores the factors of freshman year college retention by using a unique data set tracking the participation of a cohort of 1,800 students in a public state college system through 2011 from their freshman enrollment at a community college in 2006. The focus is on prevalent factors in the college retention literature, including…

International examination results have already influenced many countries to make radical reforms in education system. According to these results countries have been categorized as high, middle and low achievement in education. Turkey has also taken these results into consideration quite seriously and started to investigate to what extent there are…

This report provides key findings from a two part research project funded by the Sutton Trust and the London School of Economics & Political Science, (LSE) focusing on secondary school admissions in England. The research analyses secondary schools' admissions criteria and practices in England in 2012/13 and illustrative examples of how some…

More than 690,000 foreign students studied in the United States during the 2009-10 academic year. As non-native English-speaking students continue to pour into American educational institutions, one question many educators have is: are these international students adequately prepared for the language and cultural demands they will face when they…

This study uses entrance lotteries to explore heterogeneity in the achievement effects of charter schools across demographic groups and between urban and non-urban areas in Massachusetts. The authors develop a framework for interpreting this heterogeneity using both student- and school-level explanatory variables. (Contains 4 tables.)

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the admissions criteria used by the first two waves of secondary Free Schools in England. The type of criteria and their ranked order is explored and their potential impact on the school composition is considered. The findings demonstrate the diversity of criteria being used by this new type of…

This document presents the technical appendices that accompany the full report, "High School Choice in New York City: A Report on the School Choices and Placements of Low-Achieving Students." The appendices include: (1) The Shrinking Pool of Level 1 and Level 2 Students; and (2) Supplemental Tables and Figures. [For the full report, see…