Recent efforts to reform urban high schools have been marked by the pursuit of ever-increasing accountability policies, most notably through the use of high-stakes standardized testing, mayoral control, and secondary school exit exams. "Urban Youth and School Pushout" excavates the unintended consequences of such policies on secondary school…

High school graduation and dropout rates have long been used as indicators of educational system productivity and effectiveness and of social and economic well being. While determining these rates may seem like a straightforward task, their calculation is in fact quite complicated. How does one count a student who leaves a regular high school but…

How does education affect economic and social outcomes, and how can it inform public policy? Volume 3 of the Handbooks in the Economics of Education uses newly available high quality data from around the world to address these and other core questions. With the help of new methodological approaches, contributors cover econometric methods and…

This book is a personal account of 8 years of teaching in Texas jails and prisons. It recounts numerous anecdotes of life in prison and the experience of teaching prisoners, most of whom had very low literacy skills. It describes the prison culture and what inmates must do to survive in it. The book details the methods that have worked in reaching…

The 10 studies in this volume present a sampling of policy and legislation relating to adult learning in various parts of the world. The articles resulted from an international research project conducted at the UNESCO Institute for Education in conjunction with the University of Florence. They were written by the following contributors: Robb Mason…

"The Review of Adult Learning and Literacy: Connecting Research, Policy, and Practice, Volume 5" is a volume in a series of annual publications of the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL) that address major issues, the latest research, and the best practices in the field of adult literacy and learning.…

Saltville, Virginia, is a former company town whose main employer, a soda ash plant, shut down on July 1, 1971. The closure of the chemical plant displaced 700 workers, and created a crisis that threatened not only the existence of the town, but of the entire region. In response, Virginia Highlands Community College (VHCC), in cooperation with the…

This report, which is the seventh in a series, presents data from 1994 on high school dropout and retention rates and examines high school graduation and completion rates. Included is an analysis of the 1994 high school completion status and subsequent life activities of members of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 cohort of eighth…

The role of adult education in sustaining economic growth and expanding opportunity in Massachusetts was explored. The analysis focused on the new basic skills needed for a new economy, groups lacking the new basic skills, the demand for adult basic education (ABE), funding for ABE, building basic skills through adult education, ABE's costs and…

This book, which is intended for adult educators and human resource developers, presents guidelines for assessing adult learning. The following are among the topics covered in the book's eight chapters: (1) basic principles of informal assessment (relationship between learning and assessment activities; sequencing learning and assessment…