Using LatCrit and QuantCrit, we examined the effect of school climate, ethnic identity, and self-esteem on GPA in a sample of 300 Latinx high school students. We found significant positive correlations between climate and GPA as well as self-esteem and GPA. Moreover, using structural equation modeling, we found self-esteem mediated the…

Reading motivation may help explain some discrepancies in higher education attainment among Latinx adolescents. Using a person-centered approach to understand underlying reading motivation profiles among N = 254 Latinx adolescents, results identified four ordered classes of reading motivation including, (a) a "High" class characterized…

Elementary school teachers' math anxiety has been found to play a role in their students' math achievement. The current study addresses the role of teacher math anxiety on ninth-grade students' math achievement and the mediating factors underlying this relationship. Using data from the National Mindset Study, we find that higher teacher math…

Schools use an array of strategies to match curricula and instruction to students' heterogeneous skills. Although generations of scholars have debated ''tracking'' and its consequences, the literature fails to account for diversity of school-level sorting practices. In this article, we draw on the work of Sørensen and others to articulate and…

"Green Dot Public Schools" is a nonprofit organization that operates more than 20 public charter middle and high schools in California, Tennessee, and Washington. The "Green Dot Public Schools" model emphasizes high quality teaching, strong school leadership, a curriculum that prepares students for college, and partnerships…

This study explores middle school students' aspirations in science, technology, engineering, and medical (STE-M) careers by analyzing survey data during their eighth and ninth grade years from an ethnically and economically diverse sample of Southern California urban and suburban public school students (n = 493). Students were classified based on…

This report provides a first look at selected findings from the first follow-up of the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09). HSLS:09 focuses on understanding students' trajectories from the beginning of high school into higher education and the workforce. The core research questions for the study explore secondary to postsecondary…

The California Department of Education (CDE) has long asserted that success Algebra I by Grade 8 is the goal for all California public school students. In fact, the state's accountability system penalizes schools that do not require all of their students to take the Algebra I end-of-course examination by Grade 8 (CDE, 2009). In this dissertation,…

Every educator's quest is to help students learn in the environment that will allow them to obtain and retain the information presented to them. In the new age of technology, more students are able to choose the environment in which they learn. This study is a quantitative comparative study of the academic performance between online and…

This First Look presents findings from the base-year survey of the newly launched High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), the first round of a study that will follow a ninth-grade cohort through high school and into their postsecondary years. HSLS:09 is the fifth in a series of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) high school…

This report is a follow-up to "Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades" (Williams, Kirst, Haertel, et al., 2010). That study specified a comprehensive set of actionable practices that differentiated higher academic achievement among 303 middle grades schools in California. In doing so, the study provided a compelling and coherent account of…

The first U.S. charter school opened in 1992, and the scale of the charter movement has since grown to 4,000 schools and more than a million students in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. With this growth has also come a contentious debate about the effects of the schools on their own students and on students in nearby traditional public…