Publications on Secondary Education

One expected benefit of moving poor families from the concentrated poverty of some inner city neighborhoods to better, less poor neighborhoods, was that the children would attend better schools, with more resources and more advantaged peers who might be models for hard work and higher achievement. This brief looks at the schools MTO children attended after their move, how they did or did not differ from the schools in their pre-move neighborhoods, and what factors mattered to families choosing schools for their children.

In this Washington Times op-ed, senior education researcher Jane Hannaway explains that few school districts and states link student test performance to individual teachers. Getting good information on teacher quality might be the most important thing for a better school system.

For decades, efforts to help low-performing students have generated tension, but partnerships among teachers, administrators, state-level policymakers, and the federal government are emerging and evolving. Since the mid-1990s, a new dynamic has developed as attention shifted from targeting individual children to a broad-spectrum approach to academic achievement.

Urban school reformers for decades have tried to improve educational outcomes for underserved and disadvantaged students, with the assistance of constantly evolving federal and state policies. In recent years, education policies have shifted from targeting individual students to developing universal standards for teaching and learning, and comprehensive school reform (CSR) has emerged as an effective key model. The federal CSR program seeks to support the implementation of comprehensive school reform, especially in high-poverty schools, and to improve efforts to help all children meet challenging academic standards. Schools that receive federal CSR funds must adopt approaches that comply with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This book provides a series of studies and reflections on CSR by leading experts in the field.

There is a great need for a variety of alternative pathways to educational success, ranging from essential early intervention and prevention strategies in the early years, to a multiplicity of high-quality alternative options within mainstream K-12 systems at the middle and high school levels, and finally to opportunities outside of the mainstream for those unable to learn and thrive in the general education system. This paper reviews community- or district-based programs that have as their primary focus the re-engagement of out-of-school youth in learning in order to better prepare them to successfully enter high growth occupations and careers.