National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) studies education systems with strong student performance across the globe to understand what they do, how they do it, and the context and challenges that they face. This brief shares what has been learned about how global leaders think about high school and how they organize time in school…

Members of the Data Science Program at George Washington University (GWU) designed and implemented a tuition-free two-week summer camp at GWU for high-school students from the Washington Metro Area. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of the Chief Information Officer and his staff were our main partners in the project. The…

The middle grades have become the agreed upon starting point for high-quality Career Technical Education (CTE) programs, as this represents a critical time for students making important decisions that may have a lasting impact on their careers. However, there lacks a common view among state and local leaders on what makes up a high-quality middle…

The decline of academic achievement during summer is well documented and can result in a one-month loss of skills acquired during the school year. Summer slide can further contribute to a widening gap between low and high achieving readers. This instrumental case study explored a summer class for adolescent readers labeled as struggling.…

This study explores the role of an online pre-sessional program in preparing students to matriculate into an English-medium bachelor's program at a Japanese university. The study covers two program sessions, the first of which consisted primarily of international students, and the second comprised mainly of graduates of Japanese high schools. To…

Connections Academy is a full-time, tuition-free, virtual public school program that served more than 70,000 K-12 students in 27 states in the 2017-2018 school year. Pearson sought to explore how Connections Academy schools perform compared to the alternatives. This Research Report presents findings from two research studies: one…

The US Forest Service has a long history of youth conservation education. We investigated U.S. Forest Service citizen science programs that involve secondary school students in field collection of monitoring data to understand (1) how the programs integrated science and environmental education and (2) whether these programs advance ecological…

University earth science departments seeking to establish meaningful geoscience outreach programs often pursue large-scale, grant-funded programs. Although this type of outreach is highly successful, it is also extremely costly, and grant funding can be difficult to secure. Here, we present the Geoscience Education Outreach Program (GEOP), a…

The overall goal of the "Building State Capacity Summit" series was to enhance successful outcomes for students leaving high school, whether it is matriculation in a postsecondary education or training program, or employment. Young adults who are deaf or hard or hearing face barriers that inhibit these successful outcomes. One way to…

The gap in achievement in mathematics between at-risk students and their more advantaged counterparts is a persistent problem of the U.S. education system. Although some research-based curricula and pedagogy have demonstrated promise in supporting students from diverse backgrounds to develop conceptual understanding and procedural fluency in…

This single case study (Yin, 2009) compares an established urban physical education/ sport/physical activity program with two models: Comprehensive School Physical Activity Program/CSPAP (AAHPERD, 2013; CDC, 2013); and Lawson's propositions (2005) for sport, exercise and physical education for empowerment and community development to determine…

The shift in education reform to a goal of college and career readiness for all students is a change that has been embraced widely across the country. The challenge of designing new policies and programs that could accomplish the goal that all students should graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college…

This paper is about the interaction between policy and practice, and about how competing policies contributed to a paradoxical tension within that interaction in one school. Within a paradigm of educational renewal, the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) has initiated a number of policies designed to give schools autonomy in designing and…

As part of her Graduate Diploma in Secondary Education course, Verushka Taylor was asked to imagine how issues the Social Contexts of Secondary Education class was reading about and discussing impact upon the work of teachers. To that end, students were asked to think deeply about one of the topics addressed in the semester, and to frame a…