Analyzes the relationship between curriculum and the surprising disengagement in a "heavenly" college preparatory high school of "professional" teachers and relatively advantaged lower track students. The regressive curriculum parodies a college campus atmosphere without providing lower track students with access to the "college" academics or…

The El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence is a communitywide initiative to help teachers and principals bring students to higher standards. High-school principals can help establish K-16 standards by gathering community leaders, bridging lower and upper grades, helping teachers translate standards into practice, and aligning standards with…

Examines college preparation programs for low-income, urban, minority youths. Offers overview of college preparation models and analyzes a university-sponsored, inner-city program in which approximately 67 percent of participating students graduated from high school and enrolled in a university. Finally, proposes a "culturally responsive model"…

Focuses on high school students who complete both a vocational and a college preparatory curriculum. Examines those students' vocational concentrations and academic achievement in high school, as well as their postsecondary participation rates. (Author)

As high-school seniors begin to choose colleges in the coining months, officials at many public flagships nervously hope that their renewed outreach to Black students reverses steep and disappointing enrollment drops. Those declines, some of them by double-digit percentages, have caused extensive soul searching and near panic among academia's…

We conducted 2 studies to assess and enhance levels of graduate preparation. In Study 1, 248 undergraduates and 28 graduate students completed a new measure of graduate preparation, the Grad Prep Quiz. Results documented the psychometric utility and the predictive validity of the measure, with graduate students scoring significantly higher on this…

The time has come to improve the quality of core courses so that all students have equal opportunities to become prepared for postsecondary education and for work. The purposes of this report are to examine the gap between secondary and postsecondary education in the U.S. and to focus on successful strategies for eliminating this gap so that all…

Success of high school students in solving physics questions of student selection examination (OSS) that has to be taken by high school students before entering the Turkish universities have been investigated with regard to these questions to be solved by students and suitability to high school physics curriculum and factors affecting students…

Background/Context: Although increasing numbers of scholars have begun to focus on student experiences, research on the history of underrepresented populations' transition to college is still in its formative stage. The classic histories of higher education have tended to focus on university infrastructure and intellectual life rather than on…

ACT data suggest that the readiness of the nation's high school students for college-level reading is far too low. But ACT data also show that, while it is important for students to be able to comprehend both explicit and implicit material in texts, as well as to understand how various textual elements (such as main ideas, relationships, or…

Community colleges educate many traditionally underserved students, including students of color, first-generation students, and low-income students. This chapter discusses what we know about these students, how they have fared in college transitions, how educational pipeline and deficit models have helped or hindered their progress, and what…

Today's community college serves as the entry point to well-paying technical jobs as well as the entry point to the baccalaureate degree and beyond. What, then, can be done to ensure that low-income students have access to and success in community colleges? Research, both theoretical and empirical, shows that there is no one student characteristic…

This report focuses on the role of the college-preparatory curriculum in improving the academic achievement and college readiness of students from high schools in the member districts of the Council of the Great City Schools. Specifically, the report addresses the following questions: (1) Is taking a core college-preparatory curriculum and…

Being that educational disparities, manifested through socioeconomic instability, were a major contributing factor to the Los Angeles riots, it is important to examine how public high schools are now shaping the postsecondary opportunities of underrepresented students. Using opportunity-to-learn (OTL) and bounded rationality as frames, this…

Tennessee Code Annotated (T.C.A.) Section 49-7-202 (c) (7) requires the Tennessee Higher Education Commission to "submit a biennial report to the governor and the general assembly, commenting upon major developments, trends, new policies, budgets and financial considerations which in the judgment of the commission will be useful to the…