After PISA 2009, Shanghai education has received unprecedented attention from home and aboard. The government in Shanghai summed up the successful experience and launched the New High-Quality Schools (NHQS) project as a response. Under the policy background of promoting high-quality and equitable compulsory education in China, the NHQS project…

States' annual testing data for spring 2021 showed that unfinished learning in the wake of COVID-19 is most pronounced--and most troubling--in math. In Texas, nearly 40 percent of students failed the state's math exam in 2021. In Indiana, only 37 percent were proficient in math, down from 48 percent in 2019. Many states saw similar results. What…

In this dissertation, I address the issue of social inequalities in education and the role of the education system in confronting them. The project involves two main parts, one empirical and the other conceptual. In the first part--chapters 1 and 2--I address the practical dimension of how to reduce social inequalities in education by exploring…