Districts with expansive school choice must decide how to match students and schools. Increasingly, districts are centralizing applications on one-stop portals that feature information about schooling options, admission requirements, and a single application and deadline with the hope of increasing transparency and streamlining the enrollment…

Dutch secondary education is a multi-tiered system, and many students are placed in a single track in the first year (seventh grade) of secondary education. As part of the placement procedure, all sixth-grade students take an end of primary school test. Although these standardised attainment tests (SATs) are considered high-stakes tests, the…

Following community interaction theory and drawing upon the concept of boundary crossing, this paper investigates students' experiences of career learning across contexts when involved in placement activities. Specifically, this work focuses on students' experiences of continuity and discontinuity in relation to tensions naturally embedded in…

This study integrates an intersectional framework with data on 15,000 U.S. ninth graders from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to investigate differences in ninth-grade math course placement at the intersection of adolescents' learning disability status, race, and socioeconomic status (SES). Descriptive results support an increased…

In January 2000, the Alternative and Safe Schools Instructional and Support Division (ASSIS) of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NC DPI) was charged with developing guidelines that determined how districts could establish and maintain effective Alternative Learning Programs (NC DPI, 2014). In 2003, ASSIS produced the first…

Middle school offers an entryway onto the path of college readiness. However, many practitioners and researchers have focused their efforts on high school students. Remaining is a population of potential college-going students, whose opportunities to prepare for college at an earlier stage are overlooked because middle school is not viewed as the…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to analyze the relationship between the experience level of teachers on traditional high school campuses and student discipline placements into either ISS, OSS, or DAEP at three different levels of student enrollment consisting of students in Grades 9-12 across Texas. In the first study,…

This study reports the results of a national survey of the types and uses of assessments for matriculating secondary students into college Chinese language programs. In addition to providing an overview of college placement procedures obtained from 35 college Chinese programs, the survey also probed into the rationales behind the varied placement…

This study used a mixed methods approach to examine student access and achievement differences based on the students' 7th-grade mathematics class placement. Additionally, this study investigated the difference between teachers' perceptions and pedagogical decisions based on their students' placement levels. Finally, this study asked for teacher…

Research indicates that students from marginalized communities do not have the same access to advanced courses as the rest of the population, creating a persistent disparity (Edmunds et al., 2022; Ezzani et al., 2021; Sebastian, 2021). One reason for the equity gap is the existing enrollment process tends to miss qualified students, specifically…

The pivotal role of Algebra in the educational trajectories of U.S. students continues to motivate controversial, high-profile policies focused on when students access the course, their classroom peers, and how the course is taught. This random-assignment partnership study examines an innovative district-level reform--the Algebra I…

Why do inequalities in schooling persist, even in relatively egalitarian school systems? This article examines within school sorting as an explanation. We use classroom data on friendship networks in 480 European secondary schools and contrast comprehensive (England, Sweden) and tracked systems (Germany, Netherlands). Our question is to what…

This dissertation exams the use of a weighted 5.0-scale high school grade point average (HS GPA), the South Carolina Uniform Grading Policy Grade Point Average (SC UGP GPA), as the basis for a Multiple Measures placement system in English unique to Florence-Darlington Technical College (FDTC). FDTC's service area lies in the so-called…

In response to the most recent adoption of both the Carl D. Perkins Act (Perkins) and the CAPE Act, Brevard Public Schools (BPS) was required to implement work-based learning in all secondary Career and Technology Education (CTE) programs to ensure they receive federal funding. This qualitative case study explored the experiences of eight BPS…

This keynote address explores the history and role of college math requirements with a focus on ensuring math courses serve to expand students' horizons, rather than serve as gatekeepers. It discusses the advent of general education math courses, which brought more students into math departments, which ultimately contributed to broadening the…