A new report proposes academic pathways that would lead some students toward careers rather than college, and that is raising fears among advocates for the disadvantaged. Leaders of the "Pathways to Prosperity" project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education argue for an education system that clearly articulates students' career options as…

At a time when more high schools are looking to their graduates' college-remediation rates as a clue to how well they prepare students for college and careers, new research findings suggest a significant portion of students who test into remedial classes don't actually need them. Separate studies from Teachers College, Columbia University, and the…

With the death last week of Theodore R. Sizer, precollegiate education lost one of its most influential thinkers and a founder of the contemporary movement to improve schools. Mr. Sizer died Oct. 21 at his home in Harvard, Mass., of colon cancer. He was 77. Over his long career, Mr. Sizer was dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education,…

While policymakers and researchers alike have focused on improving students' transition into high school, a new study of Florida schools suggests the critical transition problem may happen years before, when students enter middle school. The study, part of the Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series at Harvard University,…

Noted Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner is leading a team studying the social and ethical norms of young people on the Web. Known as the "GoodPlay Project," the study is being financed with a grant from the Chicago-based Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. What researchers hope to do through the project is fill a gap in the burgeoning research…

In 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka," the South Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side was home primarily to Polish and Czech immigrants. In the decades since, South Lawndale has undergone dramatic change. Eastern Europeans moved out, and people of Mexican…

On an overcast Sunday afternoon April 2005, a crowd of teenagers and their families file through the front gates of Great America theme park, located along a boulevard in the polished suburban circuitry of Silicon Valley. Emerging briskly from this migration of bodies onto the steps of the park auditorium, flanked by his mother and father, is a…

While researchers generally agree that literacy skills should be taught directly to adolescents across the curriculum, and that there are adequate research-based strategies for doing so, expets point out that much of that information has failed to reach the classroom, or has been ignored by teachers, who are either ill prepared or disinclined to…