At a time of mushrooming interest in Advanced Placement (AP) tests, a new book, "AP: A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program," assembles studies on how capable the program is of meeting the increasingly diverse expectations held up for it. Growing out of a symposium held at Harvard in 2007, the book focuses on AP science…

New York City's charter schools are making strides in closing achievement gaps between disadvantaged inner-city students and their better-off suburban counterparts, a new study concludes. The study, conducted by Stanford University researcher Caroline M. Hoxby and her co-authors Sonali Mararka and Jenny Kang, is based on eight years of data for…

In comments on the proposed federal guidelines for stimulus funds, some researchers say there's no evidence for the policies touted. Among education researchers, one complaint about the U.S. Department of Education under former President George W. Bush was that it relentlessly promoted "scientific research in education," while at the…

This article describes the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education, at Teachers College, Columbia University. Launched last year by a pair of economists, the center specializes in calculating and comparing the long- and short-term costs--and probable payoffs--of different educational strategies that promise to improve students' lives. Studies…

Two national studies paint a portrait of the bumpy road that many students face after high school and suggest that better academic preparation and guidance could have smoothed the way. The studies, each based primarily on separate surveys of 1,300 or more 18- to 25-year-olds, come from Public Agenda, a nonprofit opinion-research group in New York…

This article discusses how a lifetime of research has led Edmund W. Gordon to the conviction that it is the out-of-school extras that nurture children's intellect. A half-century ago, the noted psychologist Edmund W. Gordon and his physician wife, Susan, opened a children's health clinic here in central Harlem. For as little as a quarter, poor…