A study released last week suggesting that California's high school exit exams are affecting some student demographic groups more than others is the latest in a small spate of studies pointing to trade-offs from policies that require high school students to pass state tests to graduate. Twenty-six states have exit exams in place or will by 2012,…

This report examines the extent to which California high school students fail to meet the high school course requirements for admission to California's four-year public universities. It investigates students' course-taking patterns and whether the courses they take meet the universities' entrance requirements. Because students from a variety of…

Among the four participating ethnic groups in Project Access for Los Angeles (Black, White, Mexican-American, and Oriental), the patterns of test performance that emerged were surprisingly similar to those from two previous studies of first-grade children, even though Access involved eleventh graders. Partially replicated was the finding that…

From 1985-86, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted a special survey of reading and mathematics performance of language minority Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American children to determine the progress of these children at grades 3, 7, and 11. The study also sought to identify whether the differences in…