If you can believe the daily flood of mass media stories, journal articles, and white papers, the United States is facing a STEM worker crisis. Business leaders and politicians warn that the nation is falling hopelessly behind in the global economic race because our students are unprepared for and uninterested in science, technology, engineering,…

Quint reports on a synthesis evaluation of three widely used high school reform models--Talent Development, First Things First, and career academies. She highlights approaches within each model that helped high schools restructure themselves in ways that affected student outcomes, particularly for struggling 9th graders and students from…

Noting the current push for rigor in secondary school curriculums (the lead member of the "new three Rs" of rigor, relevance, and relationships), Washor and Mojkowksi take a closer look at the prevailing conception of rigor. They argue that a narrowly defining a rigorous curriculum as one with more advanced courses and more factual content…

Schools and districts rarely have a fair distribution of teacher talent. Poor children and black children are less likely to be taught by the strongest teachers and more likely to be taught by the weakest. Several districts have implemented programs to reduce the teacher quality gap. Hamilton County, Tennessee, launched an initiative that included…

When Benjamin Banneker Charter Public School in Boston realized that their students' 2002-2003 math scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System fell below the target set by Massachusetts for adequate yearly progress, they saw not one problem (poor math achievement), but two. Because it was the fifth year the school had not hit AYP…