Several approaches to raising the academic success of minority high achievers exist in the form of school, community, nonprofit, and university programmatic efforts. This article represents a review of K-12 intervention programs in multiple organizational contexts that serve to strengthen the bridge to higher education for academically promising…

The topic of this article is high school social justice curriculum [SJC]. Three socially-just focused studies were critically analyzed. Sample sizes in these studies varied from n = 12 to n = 55. It is the author's belief, based on the research of others (Kerssen-Griep & Eifler, 2008) that an effective SJC should consist of the following elements:…

This study expands on the work of Huerta "et al." (2008) by reexamining the relationship between professional development and teacher leadership using more comprehensive measures of each. By confirming Huerta "et al"'s (2008) finding that Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) professional development is a significant predictor of teacher…

Rochelle Gutiérrez has spent 15 years researching effective, urban high school mathematics departments that served Black, Latin@ and low-income adolescents (see, e.g., Gutiérrez, 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002). These were schools where students took more mathematics than was required by their district; where English learners, recent immigrants,…

In the course of educational expansion, student populations have become more diverse. This paper represents an international literature review on the topic of first-generation students (FGS), i.e. students whose parents have not obtained a higher education qualification. On the basis of more than 70 research articles and reports on FGS from…

In this paper we analyze longitudinal data from a nationally representative panel of college entrants to test and compare several theoretical explanations of college degree attainment and noncompletion. So far, relatively little emphasis has been placed on determining the relative and combined predictive power of competing explanations or…

Time to completion of the baccalaureate degree has increased markedly in the United States over the last three decades, even as the wage premium for college graduates has continued to rise. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 and the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, we show that the…

This study identified what attributes principals believe best exemplify a teacher leader in schools implementing the Advancement via Individual Determination (AVID) program and what attributes they take into consideration when selecting an AVID elective teacher. After surveying more than 1,100 principals, we found that principals tended to rate…

The goal of this descriptive cross-sectional pilot study was to increase researcher knowledge of precollege preparation in three populations of traditional students attending a community college in a mid-Atlantic state: public-school students, home-schooled students, and private-schooled students. By its exploration of precollege experiences and…

Three focus groups of ninth-grade Mexican American students explored the factors contributing to a pro-college culture. The students participated in the federal initiative program called "Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs." Analysis revealed specific student, family, peer, and school personnel influences toward a…

The second year of college can be as important as the first year but far fewer studies have been conducted on second-year students. About 12% of students leave California State University - Fresno during or after their second year. In this report, we examined second year students to find the differences between those who graduate and those who…

This report examines how performance standards in reading and math on PLAN[R], the organization's college and career readiness assessment for 10th graders, compare to performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a worldwide assessment of 15-year-old students' academic achievement. The results show that the performance…

This postcard compares youth resistance across classroom contexts. It draws from a two-year ethnography of the East Oakland Step to College (Step) program, which prepared underserved African-American and Latina/o youth to enroll in four-year universities, while nurturing students' sensibilities to fight for social justice. Students were highly…

The entrepreneurial admission sector is comprised of commercial enterprises aimed at helping students increase their odds of admission, as well as providing general college information to the masses. As for-profit entities, a goal of companies in this sector is to maximize revenue and profit. Existing research identifies four main activities as…

This historical case study explores the twin forces of collaboration and competition within independent schooling by examining the merger of two long established and well respected independent schools in Cincinnati, Ohio: (1) College Preparatory School; and (2) Hillsdale-Lotspeich School. Their merger in 1974 led to the creation of The Seven Hills…