This paper examines changes from 1996-2019 in U.S. parents' time investment at their children's schools using data from the National Household Education Survey (N [approximately equal to] 116,000). The most common way parents spend time at their child's school is by attending a general school meeting, which rose from 76% to 85% over this period.…

Scholars question whether cultural capital reproduces existing inequalities or leads to upward mobility. While families provide opportunities to increase cultural capital, schools value and reward cultural capital. Thus, adolescents need to obtain cultural capital through their families to be able to navigate the education system. However, most…

The labor-market payoff to workers with associate degrees in healthcare and STEM occupations is very high in Massachusetts. We examine whether this induced a growing proportion of students in MA community colleges (MACCs) to earn an associate degree (AD) in one of these fields. We do this by using multinomial logit analysis to compare trends…

This study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS pre-K from 2012-2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups. The largest differences in enrollment emerged with respect to race and…

Parents often select schools by relying on subjective assessments of quality made by other parents, which are increasingly becoming available through written reviews on school ratings websites. To identify relationships between review content and school quality, we apply recent advances in natural language processing to nearly half a million…

Utilizing Utah state data, the aim of this study is to examine the association between language program types programs (dual language programs [DLI], sheltered instruction [SEI], and English as a second language [ESL]) since first grade and third-grade basic literacy skills of Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) in the United States. We employ…

We use data collected between April 2020 and March 2021 from the Understanding America Survey, a nationally representative internet panel of approximately 1,450 households with school-age children, to document the access of American households to K-12 education during the COVID-19 crisis. We also explore disparities by parent race/ethnicity,…

Polling data routinely indicate broad support for the concept of diverse schools, but integration initiatives--both racial and socioeconomic--regularly encounter significant opposition. We leverage a nationally representative survey experiment to provide novel evidence on public support for integration initiatives. Specifically, we present…