One of the most wideranging reforms in public education in the last decade has been the reorganization of large comprehensive high schools into small schools with roughly 100 students per grade. We use assignment lotteries embedded in New York City's high school match to estimate the effects of attendance at a new small high school on student…

Teachers put much effort into selecting books and planning literature activities that will engage their students. On reflection, the author recognized a need to give students more freedom to choose what to read. Research shows that "when students were provided opportunities to select which text(s) they would read for a given topic or unit,…

Background: Early college high schools, small schools that blur the line between high school and college, have been obtaining very strong results. This paper uses the frame of student engagement to posit an explanation for the success of these schools. Purpose: This paper examines the impact of early college high schools on indicators and…

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) is a statewide initiative offering publicly-funded vouchers to enroll in local private schools to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line. Initially established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012.…

This paper formally examines two competing methods of conducting a lottery in assigning students to schools, motivated by the design of the centralized high school student assignment system in New York City. The main result of the paper is that a single and multiple lottery mechanism are equivalent for the problem of allocating students to schools…

In the fall of 2005, the Academic Council of Tufts University proposed a new slogan to characterize its mission in educating students: "New Leaders for a Changing World." Many colleges, of course, have slogans of various kinds. The challenge is how each translates its words into action in an authentic manner. Sternberg's theory of…

Recent studies have revealed how large shares of college-ready students "undermatch", or enroll in colleges with less competitive admissions processes than they are eligible to attend. Undermatch sits at the nexus of both college access and completion agendas, as undermatching to a less selective institution results in a decreased…

Although demographic change is happening more rapidly at the elementary school level, the intersection of these demographic trends with the changing mission of high schools may offer the opportunity to reduce some of the persistent racial gaps in educational attainment. At the same time, when schools became diverse as desegregation took place,…

New York City's elite public specialized high schools have a long history of offering a rigorous college preparatory education to the City's most academically talented students. Though immensely popular and highly selective, their policy of admitting students on the basis of a single entrance exam has been heavily criticized. Many argue, for…

Three million students in the United States are classified as gifted, yet little is known about the effectiveness of traditional gifted and talented (G&T) programs. In theory, G&T programs might help high-achieving students because they group them with other high achievers and typically offer specially trained teachers and a more advanced…

Secondary education in Fiji ends with the Form 7 examination. Predictive validity for academic success of Form 7 scores which form the basis for admission into the Bachelor of Medicine Bachelor of Surgery programme of the Fiji School of Medicine was examined via a cohort of 129 students. Success rates for year 1 in 2008, 2009, and 2010 were 90.7…

One's position in an alphabetically sorted list may be important in determining access to over-subscribed public services. Motivated by anecdotal evidence, we investigate the importance of the position in the alphabet of Czech students for their admission chances into over-subscribed schools. Empirical evidence based on the population of students…

The choice of tools with which to select medical students is complex and controversial. This study aimed to identify the extent to which scores on each of three admission tools (Admission GPA, UMAT and structured interview) predicted the outcomes of the first major clinical year (Y4) of a 6 year medical programme. Data from three student cohorts…

Elite public schools must use some method of selecting their students. Given the desirability of this scarce resource, these methods are closely scrutinized. Demographic and other changes in the school districts may make unstable procedures that were deemed successful at one point. This "recurring problem" is the subject of this article,…

A diverse school district hugging the eastern border of Washington, D.C., Prince George's County, has introduced rigorous hiring methods and other practices to boost the quality of leadership in its 198 schools. In so doing, the district has also earned a spot among the pioneers in efforts nationally to ensure that public schools are led by the…