This paper compares access to full-time undergraduate higher education (HE) by members of less advantaged social classes and ethnic minorities across the four "home countries" of the UK. It uses data on applicants to HE in selected years from 1996 to 2010. In all home countries students from intermediate and working-class backgrounds…

This article draws on a participatory photography project conducted with 10 socioeconomically disadvantaged adult learners for six weeks within the framework of production pedagogy. Throughout the project, the participants took photographs about their lives in response to three prompts that I gave: (1) take photographs of people that are important…

Ethnographic research between 2000 and 2005 in the Business Department of a Further Education (FE) college (College X) was designed to uncover the validity of achievement and success rates as proxy measures for the meeting of New Labour's skills and egalitarian agenda. Whilst the general view of senior managers was that improved success rates…

This paper combines the Australian Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) micro-level data with its longitudinal continuation, the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth data, to measure the association between individual PISA scores and early school dropouts. We use multilevel modelling to distinguish between student and school…

A position paper released on December 5, 2014 by the Philadelphia School Advocacy Partners (PSAP), the advocacy arm of the Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP), calls for an "aggressive expansion of schools that are achieving results for low-income and minority students" (p. 2). The document describes what it terms…

New York is poised to take an important step to improve student achievement by expanding learning time for students attending high-poverty, low-performing schools. Recent district- and state-level investments in expanded learning time--a promising strategy to close achievement and opportunity gaps--will give students more time to learn core…

The significant growth of charter schools in the United States has brought both praise for the excellent results achieved by some schools and criticism that charter schools may not be serving the most disadvantaged students. In New York City and elsewhere, a significantly smaller proportion of students enrolled in charter schools are classified as…

This single case study examines how stakeholders of a local education agency (LEA) understand and implement state turnaround policy for its chronically underperforming schools. While there is ample research on how to improve chronically underperforming schools, that research becomes limited when looking at turnaround implementation actions that…

This report looks at the provision of General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) subjects in England in 2013. Reports on GCSE provision have been produced by Cambridge Assessment every year since 2010. This is the first year that IGCSEs have been included in the data for…

During her time at the Kellogg Honors College at Cal Poly Pomona, Suketu Bhavsar has encountered several high-achieving students who, after coming to trust her, have revealed themselves to her as undocumented. These students came to the United States as children through non-legal channels, generally brought by their families, who were searching…

The author of this article, a developmental anthropologist, illustrates how the instructor can use ethnographic films to enhance the study of anthropology and override notions about the scope and efficacy of Western intervention in the Third World, provided the instructor places such films in their proper historical and cultural context. He…

Supported by persistent educational inequality and growth of the field of neighborhood effects research, this meta-analysis investigates the relative association of neighborhood advantage and disadvantage to educational outcomes; the consistency of associations across different educational indicators; and the moderating influence of model…

This paper examines the causal impacts of Hong Kong's 1971 policy of free compulsory education on students' educational attainment. Using a regression discontinuity method and Hong Kong Census data, this study compares children born just before and just after the month in which the compulsory-education law came into effect. The results show that…

The current study examines the effects of Head Start on the development of school readiness outcomes for children living in non-parental care. Data were obtained from the Head Start Impact Study, a randomized controlled trial of Head Start conducted with a nationally representative sample of Head Start programs and families. The sample included…

This paper presents a spatial analysis of multiple deprivation in South Africa and demonstrates that the most deprived areas in the country are located in the rural former homeland areas. The analysis is undertaken using the datazone level South African Index of Multiple Deprivation which was constructed from the 2001 Census. Datazones are a new…