The objective of this dissertation was to design and study a transformative model of climate change education that foregrounded sociopolitical processes and was socially relevant to Black and Latinx urban high school students. The intervention was implemented at the Mann-UCLA Community School in South Los Angeles while distance learning was…

Public charter schools increasingly are part of both the national conversation about education policy and the local urban scene in America. Previous studies of public charter schools have examined their achievement effects focused on both the state and metropolitan levels, and funding disparities focused on the state levels. This report is the…

The present study examines the feasibility and effectiveness of a short-term (five- to ten-session) school-based parenting intervention for children ages five to eleven. The intervention teaches parents to improve child behaviors at home and at school. Pre-test and post-test questionnaires were completed by parents at the beginning and end of the…

In 2011, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) conducted a compliance review of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to examine the district's provision of resources and opportunities to schools with predominantly African American students as compared with schools with predominantly White students. The purpose of this study is to examine the…

Mobile technology is now ubiquitous in families' lives and, as such, provides fertile ground for organic technology learning embedded within everyday home practices, like oral storytelling. This article explores the experiences of three Latinx women participating in a family digital storytelling program held at an East Los Angeles Head Start…

This study aimed to better understand the role that an undergraduate teacher exploration program for STEM majors played in STEM teacher education and recruitment. Utilizing journal data from 126 undergraduate students engaged in an intensive and immersive four-day internship that took place in Summer 2015 and Summer 2016, this study examined how…

This commentary suggests that new school design is a fertile policy context for advancing research-practice partnerships. The authors represent four public universities that have created new school designs in partnership with urban school districts. Unlike the laboratory schools of previous generations, these university-partnered public schools…

In 2007, civic and philanthropic leaders founded the nonprofit Partnership for Los Angeles Schools to transform some of the city's highest-need, lowest-performing schools. Eleven years later, schools in the Partnership network have made notable improvements, with much more substantial gains in student performance relative to other schools in the…

Like many large districts in urban U.S. cities, L.A. Unified struggles to produce strong results for all students. On 2015-16 end-of-year state tests, 60 percent of students did not meet state standards in English language arts (ELA). Students fared even worse in math: 70 percent performed below grade level. High-need students are struggling the…

School choice was intended to expand options and equity, and it holds promise for many students with unique needs. But it is clear that no choice system can be equitable until all students have real access to those choices. More than 400,000 youth are currently in foster care in the United States, many of whom experience significant obstacles in…

Urban school districts will face a number of new and unprecedented challenges in the 2020-2021 school year. In addition to safely reopening schools, planning for the likelihood of future rolling school closures, redesigning instructional delivery models, and effectively addressing unfinished learning and learning losses among students, schools…

This report presents key findings from "Learning in the Fast Lane: The Past, Present, and Future of Advanced Placement," by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Andrew E. Scanlan, and published by Princeton University Press in 2019. American education has long been plagued by excellence gaps among the young people who make it into the highest levels…

Students with low socioeconomic status (SES) are much less likely to participate in out-ofschool-time (OST) activities than their more affluent peers. This "opportunity gap" may have compounding effects, as these activities help develop key noncognitive factors: the skills, beliefs, and behaviors associated with college readiness.…

Seeking to meet Freire's (Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 1987) call to enact a critical pedagogy of love, this article explores how one urban teacher/researcher engages in pedagogy that supports students to heal from internalized oppression towards what bell hooks (Talking back:…

Novice teachers' professional contexts may have important implications for their effectiveness, development, and retention. However, descriptions of these contexts suffer from data limitations, resulting in unidimensional or vague characterizations. Using 10 years of administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, we describe…