Despite adolescent girls' superior school achievement and high career aspirations, fewer women than men achieve career eminence. Understanding early influences on the development of gifted girls' career-related values and aspirations may help to explain this discrepancy in career outcomes. This article reports findings from a qualitative,…

This study examines the association between college-bound friends and college enrollment using restricted transcript data from the High School Longitudinal Study. Propensity score matching and school fixed effects models suggest that having close college-bound friends is positively associated with enrolling in college. However, Black and Latino…

Students and families in Chicago are increasingly taking up school choice options offered by the school district. Prospective high school students and their families have 160 high schools to choose from. These options include a broad variety of schools in governance, size, academic approach, and programs offered. To streamline the school…

Skeptics of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school network argue that these schools rely on selective admission, attrition, and replacement of students to produce positive achievement results. We investigate this using data covering 19 KIPP middle schools. On average, KIPP schools admit students disadvantaged in ways similar to other…

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 article examines the high school search activities, choices, and final assignments of academically similar, but ethnically and socioeconomically different, eighth-grade students attending one New York City middle school. Despite being comparable candidates for admission to academically competitive high schools, the middle-class children of…

Taking advantage of lottery-like features in New York City's high school admissions process, previous MDRC reports have provided rigorous evidence that new small public high schools are narrowing the educational attainment gap and markedly improving high school graduation prospects, particularly for disadvantaged students. The new findings in this…

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) is a statewide initiative offering publicly-funded vouchers to enroll in local private schools to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line. Initially established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012.…

Teach For America (TFA) and the Teaching Fellows programs are an important and growing source of teachers of hard-to-staff subjects in high-poverty schools, but comprehensive evidence of their effectiveness has been limited. This report presents findings from the first large-scale random assignment study of secondary math teachers from these…

The School District of Philadelphia's tiered system of selective, nonselective, and charter high schools, and the process for high school choice, has created real variation in the degree to which high schools can successfully meet the needs of ninth graders. Research has shown that the ninth grade year is critical in determining a student's…