California's 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education promised all students a chance to pursue a baccalaureate degree by guaranteeing a place at one of the public 4-year institutions for all students who successfully fulfill a minimum set of requirements at a community college. However, capacity constraints in the state's public colleges and…

For many, merit, defined by test scores, is a readily accessible representation of academic ability, and both the K-12 and postsecondary systems have used such scores as a guide at multiple levels of decision making and accountability. In assessing the strengths and limitations of increasingly test-defined efforts to improve K-12 education and,…

Outside its heavily-populated south-eastern corner, Queensland is a huge administrative area with many small, remote communities that can be separated by hundreds of kilometres of dirt road, or, in other areas, not accessible by road. In this study, parents, students and teachers in nine schools from rural and regional Queensland were interviewed…