As states move to implement the Common Core State Standards, key challenges remain. One is how to make sure a high school diploma acknowledges what students have achieved. Should states adopt a two tiered diploma, in which students who pass internationally aligned Common Core exams at a career- and college-ready level receive an…

The Texas Ten Percent Plan (TTP) provides students in the top 10 percent of their high-school class with automatic admission to any public university in the state, including the two flagship schools, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M. Texas created the policy in 1997 after a federal appellate court ruled that the state's…

If 2012 was the year of the MOOC--massive open online course--then 2013 was the year the MOOC hype returned to Earth. Largely lost in the coverage in both years, however, was the impact MOOCs might have in high schools. Although the jury is still out on that question, high schools around the country are experimenting with adding MOOCs to their…

This article describes the results of a California state law established in 2010 that created "Districts of Choice." The District of Choice law was meant to encourage districts to compete for students by offering innovative programs and this-school-fits-my-child options that parents wanted. This designation meant that children from any…

There's broad commitment to ensuring that all high-school graduates are college- and career-ready, but heated debate about the best means of achieving that goal. The big question is, how can schools both respect the diversity of students' interests and ambitions and set a high bar for all? In this forum, two longtime advocates of high…

This article presents a debate over the Common Core State Standards Initiative as it has rocketed to the forefront of education policy discussions around the country. The author contends that there is value in having clear cross state standards that will clarify the new online and blended learning that the growing use of technology has provided…

Today's education technology holds immense promise, but what matters more than the tools themselves are how they are used in schools and in classrooms. In "Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age," Frederick M. Hess and Bror Saxberg argue that educators have tended to think of adopting technology as a way to "reform" or…

This study takes advantage of the unexpected announcement of the Kalamazoo Promise to study its effects on student achievement and behavior in high school. The Kalamazoo Promise provides college scholarships to graduates of Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS), a midsized urban school district in Michigan that is racially and economically diverse.…

Named Charter Leader of the Year in 2010 by the California Charter Schools Association, Diane Tavenner, CEO of Summit Public Schools, is responsible for the generation of multiple transformative schools and a radically different teaching model for Summit. Summit's first charter high school, Summit Prep, launched in 2003, was featured in the…

In 1996, Cardinal John J. O'Connor, archbishop of New York, proposed to Rudy Crew, chancellor of the New York City public school system, that the city's most troubled public-school students be sent to Catholic schools, where he would see that they were given an education. New York City's mayor at that time, Rudolph Giuliani, a…

For this study, the authors designed an experiment to test whether some high-achieving, low-income students would change their behavior if they knew more about colleges and, more importantly, whether a cost-effective way to help such students realize their full array of college opportunities can be implemented. This was done by randomly assigning…

The Alliance Tennenbaum Family Technology High School, a charter school on L.A.'s east side, uses a hybrid model that combines online and traditional instruction and offers students three different ways to learn. In the months since it adopted the rotational model, known as Blended Learning for Alliance School Transformation, or BLAST,…

Between 1970 and 2000, the U.S. high-school graduation stagnated while in many other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries it rose markedly. By 2000, the high school graduation rate in the United States ranked 13th among the 19 OECD countries for which comparable data are available. Evidence from two independent…

In all the acrimonious discussion surrounding No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), surprisingly little attention has been given to the actual impact of that legislation and other accountability systems on student performance. Now a reputable body, a committee set up by the National Research Council (NRC), the research arm of the National…

Policymakers nationwide continue to wrestle with a basic question: At what grade level should students move to a new school? In the most common grade configuration in American school districts, public school students make two school transitions, entering a middle school in grade 6 or 7 and a high school in grade 9. This pattern reflects the…