Purpose: Urban school districts often face challenges in filling principal vacancies with effective leaders, especially in high-needs schools. Prospective principals' engagement with the job application process may contribute to these challenges. The goal of this study is to better understand the job search strategies and behaviors of prospective…

How gender diversity is exhibited varies: some individuals feel similar to the other gender; others experience little similarity to either gender, and some feel similar to both genders. For children, do these variations relate to differing relationships with peers? The goal was to assess whether a community sample of children (884, Mage = 9.04, SD…

The overuse of exclusionary discipline practices, such as out-of-school suspensions (OSS), have consistently been documented over several decades. The resulting racial discipline disparities and the negative outcomes related to OSS have led policy makers and educators to consider other approaches to school discipline. One such approach, which has…

Schools are increasingly hiring full-time, unarmed school security professionals (SSPs), who are different from School Resource Officers (SROs), to help facilitate safe and supportive school climates. However, there is a paucity of literature about how they describe and engage with social emotional learning (SEL), particularly equity-focused or…

Despite increasing reliance on licensed practical nurses (LPNs) to provide health services in schools, we do not know whether this is a cost-effective prevention strategy against student absenteeism. Therefore, we evaluated the costs and effectiveness of an LPN-based school nursing program for improving attendance and chronic absenteeism at a…

This study uses data from semi-structured interviews conducted with 44 early childhood education (ECE) staff and examines how knowledge dissemination processes operate in ECE centers, including how information from off-site trainings is diffused among staff. Our sample includes administrators, lead teachers, and assistant teachers serving children…

Racism is enmeshed within the fabric of U.S. public education, making it critical to identify and dismantle. One way to do this is to provide professional development (PD) to teachers targeting anti-racism to build awareness, decenter whiteness, and advance racial equity in schools. This systematic review is a synthesis of anti-racism PD studies,…

School systems have taken on greater roles in guiding and supporting classroom instruction by redesigning their "educational infrastructure" -- the coordinated resources, structures, and norms that support teachers' work and drive instructional improvement. However, teachers often adapt or resist common instructional approaches citing…

Research consistently shows that among young children, poor social skills and problem behaviors can lead to poor relationships with teachers and peers (Boivin et al., 1995), higher risk of academic failure (Buhs et al., 2006), and higher school dropout (Gilliam, 2005). Moreover, prekindergarten (PreK) and kindergarten (K) teachers report feeling…

We investigated the impact of a subsidized, needs-based preschool program (Study 1; N = 1,894) and California's universal but age-restricted transitional kindergarten (TK) program (Study 2; N = 1,093) on school readiness. We applied Mahalanobis matching--a quasi-experimental data analysis method used to create equivalent groups--to data from three…

Background: Vocabulary and domain knowledge are important factors that influence comprehension development. However, these factors have most frequently been examined in relation to reading comprehension and much less frequently examined in relation to listening comprehension. Moreover, almost no empirical studies have examined profiles of…

Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) characteristically experience academic difficulties. There is growing evidence that the continuum from academic competence to underachievement is partially explained by executive function (EF; neurocognitive attention-regulation processes) and stress. Yet, there is scarce research…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide concrete examples of what leadership behaviors and strategies look like in high-poverty urban schools in Chicago that are successful at improving student outcomes. We compared the strategies used by principals who were rated by their teachers on annual surveys as being strong instructional leaders…

COVID-19 has presented unprecedented challenges to schools, leaving principals to lead rapid organizational change with limited guidance or support. Drawing on interviews from a larger, national study of principals at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we analyzed the experiences of 20 principals in four large, urban school districts--Boston,…

Numbers and variables often follow the same principles of arithmetic operations, yet numbers can be computed to a value whereas variables cannot. We examined the effect of symbols--numbers versus variables--on middle school students' problem-solving behaviors in a dynamic algebra notation system by presenting problems in numbers (e.g., 3+5-3) or…