The underlying ambition of fee-free education is to increase school access. This study reflects on decentralisation in the decision-making process and implementation of fee-free policies. We compare two policies at the high school level in Ghana to evaluate the differences and commonalities in how they responded to school access. We used…

Portraits of a Graduate (POGs) have become popular in education over the past decade as states and districts work to better define the knowledge and skills that students should master before high school graduation. The impetus for the development of POGs comes from several converging factors in the educational landscape. As states and districts…

Dual enrollment courses provide students with the opportunity to access advanced learning experiences, earn high school and college credit simultaneously, and possibly lower their tuition burden toward a postsecondary degree. State policymaker interest in dual enrollment is driven by its potential to smooth transitions between high school and…

Automatic admissions policies (AAPs, "percent plans") redistribute college-going opportunities across segregated high schools to diversify college enrollments, increasing opportunities at predominantly minority high schools. If students "game" AAPs by attending schools with increased opportunities, AAPs could alter racial…

While many scholars recognize and criticize the politicization of education policies, scholarly attention to the strategies politicians utilize to politicize educational policy discourses remains limited. Focusing on the officials of Ghana's two major political parties, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), as…

A continued gap exists in student achievement between Indigenous and non- Indigenous students in the British Columbia school system. This article analyzes the balance of success and failure of the Accountability Framework, a provincial program designed to increase graduation rates in the province. In order to understand the successes and failures…

Purpose: The present research sought the views of 157 stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, and school executive members) in three Australian urban government high schools and departmental and management staff of the Department of Education to determine the current status of social and emotional well-being (SEW) in an Australian context.…

We use event history analysis on an aggregate dataset from 1997 to 2018 to understand the state-level antecedents associated with the adoption of test-based grade retention policies. Findings indicate that the educational conditions of a state to be more predictive of retention policy adoption than the political, economic, and geographic measures.…

Nearly all states require students to complete a certain number of units per course to earn a standard diploma in the state; but courses, units and assessments outside of exit exams and diploma options vary. This interactive resource provides an overview of state high school graduation requirements. To see how all states approach specific…

While education equality is considered crucial for broader social equality, policies that aim to equalize educational resources are sometimes suspected of discriminating against high achievers. Such potential discrimination should be examined empirically to provide robust evidence for policymakers and the broader public. Using a quasi-experimental…

Indigenous education increasingly seeks to reclaim the institutions of state assimilation as spaces for the dissemination and support of localized forms of knowledge and language use and the valorization of alternative citizenship identities. In this study, I compare two schools in Ecuador to show how divergent ways of teaching Kichwa promote or…

U.S. federal policies No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top resulted in a policy overlap that created unique challenges and opportunities for administrators. This study examined principals' perceptions of an overlapping accountability-innovation policy context and their sense of how the policies affected their role as leaders. Primary data for…

Harnessing a cluster randomized controlled trial, we estimated the impact on students' advanced placement (AP) examination performance of a project-based learning (PBL) approach to AP compared with a lecture-based AP approach. Through PBL, teachers primarily play a facilitator role, while students work on complex tasks organized around central…

The utility of teacher evaluation depends on meaningful teacher engagement with evaluation processes. However, critics of traditional tenure policies suggest that tenure nullifies teacher engagement with practices to improve performance. This study investigates whether tenured teachers exhibit perceptions that reflect disengagement with evaluation…

This study compared the performance of bilingual learners, educated in either a Transitional Bilingual (TB) or Dual Language (DL) program, on the Reading and English portions of the nationally recognized college entrance exam, the American College Test (ACT). A statistically significant difference was found on the t-tests run for the Reading (p…