Two decades ago, the New Jersey Supreme Court in "Abbott v. Burke" mandated that the state establish high quality preschool education in the 31 highest-poverty school districts. New Jersey created a pre-K program with high standards and a continuous improvement system that transformed a patchwork of private and public programs into a…

We use data from 2015-2016 to document faculty representation and wage gaps by race-ethnicity and gender in six fields at selective public universities. Consistent with widely available information, Black, Hispanic, and female professors are underrepresented and White and Asian professors are overrepresented in our data. Disadvantaged minority and…

Utilizing surveillance data from five sites participating in the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, we investigated contributions of surveillance subject and census tract population sociodemographic characteristics on variation in autism spectrum disorder ascertainment and prevalence estimates from 2000 to 2008 using ordinal…

This case study focuses on one primarily Latino public primary school in New Jersey that waived the state's bilingual education requirement and implemented a curricular alternative, comprised of bilingual and monolingual English classrooms. A corpus was generated from one-to-one interviews (N = 8) with administrators and teachers, as well as…

Many adolescent learners have difficulty understanding the relevance of mathematics for their lives. This problem is particularly pernicious among Black and Latino adolescents who often face cultural stigma that can affect their perceived value of mathematics. The present study used concurrent nested mixed methods to explore this issue in 419…

New Brunswick High School, which had been racially integrated for decades, became majority-minority (and soon, all minority) in the 1970s, after years of legal wrangling led hundreds of its students to depart for a new, nearly all-white high school in the adjacent suburb of North Brunswick. White suburbanites invoked "local control" to…

Catholic educational institutions play an important role in educating Latino high achieving students. Latino students attending Catholic high schools are more likely to graduate and transition to college immediately following high school. Few studies have examined the outcomes of Latino students who attend Catholic colleges and universities and…

Hispanic-American youth have been identified as a high-risk group for developing behavioral and emotional difficulties. Currently, there exist few behavioral and emotional screening measures targeting young children, with even fewer accessible to the Spanish speaking populations in the U.S. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether…

The graduation rates for Hispanic students in higher education are the lowest in the nation in comparison to any other subgroups, yet they are the fastest growing population in the nation. Lack of a rigorous curriculum in a K-12 setting and college readiness skills are factors. There needs to be a strong partnership among K-12 school districts and…

Balanced literacy has been proposed as a compromise or middle ground between philosophical approaches to reading instruction that stress teaching of word recognition and those that stress construction of meaning. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the READ 180 balanced literacy supplementary instruction program on…

In 2009, Excelencia in Education launched the Ensuring America's Future initiative to inform, organize, and engage leaders in a tactical plan to increase Latino college completion. An executive summary of Latino College Completion in 50 states synthesizes information on 50 state factsheets and builds on the national benchmarking guide. Each…

Objectives: To assess hookah use among youth for prevalence, associations, and changes over time. Methods: Data from the 2008 and 2010 New Jersey Youth Tobacco Survey were analyzed to examine hookah smoking by gender, race/ethnicity, and grade level. Results: Prevalence of hookah use increased significantly among black and Hispanic students.…

The population growth, labor force participation, and educational attainment of Latinos in the U.S. influence the composition of the current and future U.S. society, economy, and workforce. In 2012, the Latino population in the United States is the youngest and fastest growing ethnic group, with the highest level of labor force participation…

The study explored whether aspects of elementary students' writing about their personal values could predict if students were considered more at risk or more resilient. Essays from 176 fifth-grade students (79.54% African American, 20.46% Hispanic) from a low-income, urban district in New Jersey were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word…

When it comes to educational challenges, the nation's 12.1 million Hispanic schoolchildren face plenty: language, poverty, lower-than-average graduation rates for high school and college, and, more recently, a wave of laws targeting illegal immigrants that has made school seem like less of a safe haven for Hispanic students in some states. Yet, as…