Giving parents and students the ability to choose their school is promoted by supporters as the key to improving American education overall. On the surface, the idea has great appeal. Who, after all, opposes having choices? Indeed, both Democratic and Republican policymakers, including President Trump, have embraced school choice as a reform…

Positive youth development (PYD) orients youth toward pro-social and forward-looking behavior through programs that emphasize youth empowerment and involvement, focus on skill development and character building, incorporate community collaboration at multiple levels, and include positive adult role models and mentors that interact with youth in…

Nationwide, magnet programs enroll more than twice the number of students served by charter schools, making them the most popular form of school choice. Across the U.S., over 1.5 million U.S. children attend magnet schools. In Miami-Dade County Public Schools, over 42,000 students are enrolled in magnet programs. The bulk of this report focuses on…

When the Connecticut State Department of Education published its first district report cards in 2003, it was obvious that the Hartford Public Schools district was struggling. Fewer than half of its students were proficient on the state reading exam. Math performance was better, but 63 percent of 10th-graders and 43 percent of younger students…

Pay for performance (PFP) is once again gaining popularity within education. This study examines teacher attitudes toward PFP policies, and how these views vary by teacher experience, subject area specialization, grade level(s) taught, educational background, personality characteristics, risk and time preferences, and feelings of efficacy. Data…

As educators try to make schools more responsive to the diverse needs of students, public alternative schools are becoming increasingly investigated as viable and necessary options. This book provides an overview of public alternative education in the United Sates. Following the foreword by Robert D. Barr, acknowledgements, and the introduction,…

This summative evaluation of magnet programs employed a quasi-experimental design to investigate whether or not students enrolled in magnet programs gained any achievement advantage over students who were not enrolled in a magnet program. Researchers used Zero-One Linear Programming to draw multiple sets of matched samples from the non-magnet…

The Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP) was designed to eliminate and prevent minority group isolation in targeted magnet schools in the Wake County (North Carolina) Public School System; this evaluation report examines factors that relate to achieving the MSAP goals and objectives. Parent survey data were used to determine whether increased…

The career magnet high school programs of the New York City (NYC) public school system were evaluated in an experimental study. The experimental design compared the ninth-grade performance of students randomly selected for magnet schools with those who "lost the lottery." It included 91 pools of students: 3,272 with average reading…