The Ventures in Education program, begun 10 years ago, includes honors-level curriculum, advanced placement courses, summer workshops, enrichment, a longer school day, and continued counseling and guidance. It has demonstrated that poor, disadvantaged high school students can learn to excel in demanding courses of study. (MSE)

Describes a specialized school for the arts for high school students. Discusses courses in ceramics, metal working, photography, advancement placement in studio art, and art history. Explains the relationship between this specialized school and the surrounding high schools that these students attend for other subjects. (KM)

Discusses resources that can be used in an Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. history course, including a series of textbooks, supplemental readings, projects, Document-Based Questions and essays from earlier AP examinations, Internet and multimedia resources, and students and their families. (CMK)

Examines an Advanced Placement U.S. history classroom as a miniature common school to assess students' abilities to develop historically-grounded perspectives and engage in a moral debate. Finds that (1) students with little historical-grounding lacked an inclination toward a collective, ethical critique; and (2) exchange of historically-grounded…

A talented child's motivation and artistic gift can suffer when the environment at home and at school are inadequately supportive. It's crucial, therefore, for parents and teachers to understand that any child's involvement in the arts can enhance overall success in academics and in later life. It's just as important to learn about the many ways…

This article describes a grant-funded effort to improve the lives of academically able middle and high school students living in rural poverty. The program, Project Aspire, attempts to increase the number of these children in the most rigorous math and science coursework available in their schools. To that end, Project Aspire assists 14 school…

This article discusses commonalities that exist between two popular educational approaches that provide options for a wide range of student achievement levels, the Schoolwide Enrichment Model and the International Baccalaureate, especially the Primary Years Programme, in classroom practice. Introductions to the International Baccalaureate and…

What are ways to encourage minority students and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds to take and succeed in AP classes? Advanced Placement courses and their final national standardized exams began in 1954 to help students, mostly white males, get through college more quickly so that they would have more time in the work force. 50 years later,…

Project Aspire was created to identify poor rural students with academic potential and to provide them with academic and counseling support in advanced placement courses and prerequisites. This article describes Project Aspire and its foundations; the relevant lessons learned from the literature on poverty, small schools, rural schools, and gifted…

In this article, the author discusses AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), a program that enrolls the students who are most frequently marginalized in rigorous classes to prepare them for postsecondary education. The best predictor of success or failure in postsecondary education is the intensity and quality of secondary school…

Analyses based on fitting item response models to data from the College Board's Advanced Placement exams in Chemistry and United States History indicated that the constructed-response portion of the tests yielded little information over and above that provided by the multiple-choice sections. These tests also allow examinees to select subsets of…

A practicum was developed to increase the number and success rate of junior Honors English students--63 students who were 62% Latino and 38% African-American--taking the English Advanced Placement (AP) examinations. Test strategies that were designed to allay students' innate fears about tests in general and specifically about English language and…

This booklet describes the College Core Curriculum (CCC) program recently initiated at Phineas Banning Senior High School in Los Angeles, which is designed to encourage more students to become positive, effective learners and to better prepare them for postsecondary education. Following an outline of CCC's goals and a breakdown of its programs…

Each year, African American high school students in grades 11 and 12 take the College Board/Educational Testing Service Advanced Placement (AP) Examinations. Large numbers of these students are not successful. Nationally, African Americans take a total of 13,844 examinations and 5,447 qualify for advanced placement. This means that 61 percent of…

Students' initial perceptions of distance learning were assessed. The STAR SCHOOLS program, an initiative to promote the use of telecommunications in education and distance learning, funded the Alabama STAR SCHOOLS Program through the University of Alabama (Birmingham). Twelve satellite courses produced by Oklahoma State University were delivered…