Objective: To examine health behaviors associated with overweight/obesity by race/ethnicity at a diverse urban college. Participants: 270 undergraduates (77.0% female; 26.7% non-Hispanic white) and median body mass index (BMI) of 23.1 kg/m2. Methods: A questionnaire about health-related behaviors as part of the "Get Fruved" project was…

COVID-19 caused the most dramatic disruption of elementary and secondary education in our lifetime. By late March 2020, every US state had closed public schools in an effort to flatten the curve. Delays in reopening schools have coincided with the emergence of sharp divisions among parents in their willingness to send their children back to…

Many policymakers agree that housing and land use reform is a top priority, particularly in New York State, in order to moderate housing prices. But an often-overlooked point is that such reform is also important in order to promote equal educational opportunity. This report proceeds in five parts. The first part takes a deep dive into how two…

This study examines autism diagnosis prevalence within the New York City (NYC) Universal Pre-K for All (UPK) program expansion into racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse NYC neighborhoods. Here, it is hypothesized that racial/ethnic differences in autism diagnoses may close as more children are referred for testing by UPK programs,…

New York City's universal pre-kindergarten program, which increased full-day enrollment from 19,000 to almost 70,000 children, is ambitious in both scale and implementation speed. We provide new evidence on the distribution of pre-K quality in NYC by student race/ethnicity, and investigate the extent to which observed differences are associated…

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to understand how principals who lead community schools in New York City make sense of their work and their lived experiences in advancing social justice for their students and school communities particularly during this COVID-19 pandemic. Community schools, by virtue of their design and…

In the 40-plus years since the "Individuals with Disabilities Education Act," special education has grown in the number of students and amount spent on services. Despite this growth, academic performance of students with disabilities remains troublingly low compared to general education students. To some extent, these differences reflect…

Students in poverty need both academic and social supports. Former New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew and scholar Pedro Noguera argue that students in poverty need both intensive academic and social supports. They maintain that U.S. education policy, with its focus on academic accountability, has generally failed to grasp this dual…

Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with New York City families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects white, black, Latinx, and Asian parents' and students'…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, undergraduate enrollment dropped by nearly 10%. Yet those who are attending college are still shouldering a hefty financial burden. This issue brief examines a survey of 1,521 women in New York City to learn more about their experiences with student loan debt during the pandemic. The results indicate glaring…

There is limited empirical evidence about educational interventions for students experiencing homelessness, who experience distinct disadvantages compared to their low-income peers. We explore how two school staffing interventions in New York City shaped attendance outcomes of students experiencing homelessness using administrative records from…

Families indicate that fit and safety are priorities in school selections. It is not clear, however, whether school racial composition shapes families' perceptions of anticipated school belonging. Using a survey experiment with students and parents actively choosing NYC schools, I find that families expressed racialized judgments of belonging.…

Objective: This quantitative study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students' persistence at a minority-serving, open-access, public, urban community college in New York City. Specifically, the project looked at factors associated with mid-semester college withdrawals during spring 2020 when the college shifted to remote instruction…

This data brief is intended to shed light on the scope and scale of the disparities in college attainment across New York City. The analysis is conducted on data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 and 2018 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. More specifically, it looks at educational attainment for working-age (age 25-64) residents of the…

Despite best efforts among mental health service providers on community college campuses, students of color often feel hesitant to utilize such services, despite even the most urgent needs. The purpose of this research is to better understand the experiences and attitudes of urban community college students specific to mental health and mental…