Social, emotional, and academic skills are essential to success in school, the workplace, our homes, and our communities, allowing individuals to contribute successfully and meaningfully to our society (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011; Jones & Kahn, 2017). The labor market acknowledges the importance of these…

This article describes the change process at East Los Angeles College (ELAC) to address the unique barriers that Latinx students face in transferring to 4-year institutions. Since 2014, California Community Colleges have had an unprecedented opportunity to target disparities in academic outcomes through the Student Equity Policy (SEP) and its…

The devastating wildfires that erupted in Southern California in early January 2025 were historic in scale and impact, and interrupted the education of more than 725,000 students. There was a disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations, including students with disabilities, Latino and multilingual learners, and the socio-economically…

A First-Year Seminar course was designed using high-impact practices supporting food justice at a university serving mainly urban, minority, Hispanic, and first-generation students. The course was initially taught using participatory experiential learning but without service-learning. After an urban farm was added to campus to support the…

Black and Latinx four-year college graduation rates remain low, per the research, which corresponds to 45.9 percent for Blacks and 55 percent for Latinx, but when compared to White and Asian four-year college students, these rates are 71.7 percent for Asians, and 67.2 percent for Whites (Shapiro et al., 2017). This descriptive qualitative research…

Organized out-of-school time (OST) activities are critical assets that help youth develop life and social skills. Latine youth have some of the lowest rates of participation in OST activities out of all racial and ethnic subgroups due to structural and interpersonal barriers that perpetuate and reproduce patterns of inequality. The purpose of the…

Efforts to transform urban schools often overlook the role of students in shaping educational spaces. And so, I ask: How do students, as the primary users of school space, make and shape their school? I draw from spatial inquiry that emphasizes the social production of space to provide a glimpse into the spatial perspectives and practices of Azul,…

Purpose: This study examines the expansion of two-way dual language (TWDL) programs in Los Angeles Unified School District from 2000 to 2022, analyzing their growth in relation to neighborhood change, charter school expansion, and enrollment decline. We use a novel data set combining program founding years, school-level enrollments, and…

The rise of Latinx college enrollment has resulted in a corresponding increase in colleges identifying as Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI). Yet, Latinx students' degree attainment continues to lag, with a noteworthy drop in attendance after the first year of college. Freshman year is a pivotal time as students adjust to a new environment and…

Introduction: Children with optic nerve hypoplasia (ONH) frequently have co-occurring developmental disorders, and children with both visual impairments and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have complex educational needs. Research Question: Do the individualized education programs (IEPs) of children with visual impairment and ASD comport with…

Historically, low-income Catholic secondary schools have provided opportunities for underrepresented students to receive quality education and matriculate to community college and four-year universities. This trend continues today, yet for schools like one in this study who identify as college preparatory schools, what happens to students once…

Despite a growing national focus on computer science (CS) education, students with disabilities are often excluded from or not able to access high quality CS experiences and coursework. One reason for this is a lack of teachers who support students with disabilities and also hold CS knowledge and skills. Integrating CS into preservice teacher…

Measures of 31 Latinx students' attitudes in a Grade 5 Spanish dual language bilingual education (DLBE) program were compared with those of the same students four years prior. Twenty-one mainstream English students comprised a comparison group for the same time period. Some statistically significant changes occurred for students in DLBE related to…

This study documents patterns of cultural value conflict and harmony for Latino students in two relational domains--among the students themselves and between the students and their teachers--in two second grade classrooms in the Los Angeles area. One of the classrooms was led by a teacher who participated in a professional development program, the…

Over the last two decades, the Los Angeles Unified School District has adopted a series of policies to improve college readiness for its hundreds of thousands of students. Among those policies was the adoption of the A-G curriculum requirements for all graduating high school seniors. These policies were intended to better prepare students for…