Compared to all other options, homeschooling provides parents with the most control over their children's educational experiences. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in the U.S. homeschool population. Black families had the largest increase in home educators from 3.3% to 16.1% between April 2020 and October 2020. The emerging literature on Black…

Background: Communities consist of interconnected sub-systems, such as schools, healthcare organizations, and businesses, each fulfilling specific functions that contribute to the overall well-being of the community. Effective community responses to crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, require collaboration across these sectors. However,…

Preparing students for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is one of the United States' K-12 educational concerns (Gandhi et al., 2016). Despite the National Science Foundation's (NSF) report that the number of students participating in STEM fields continues to increase, the number of underrepresented students…

This study explored the impact of military education benefits on influencing how service members, while enlisted, navigated their higher education journeys. Iloh's model of college-going decisions was an integral theoretical framework in the implementation of this qualitative case study. The case study aimed to capture the narratives of the…

The goal of this study was to provide insights on the extent to which high school students receive support for college and career planning, the mechanisms through which they receive this information, and how this varies across students and settings using data from a multi-state, multi-study project focused on advising for postsecondary…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) began a new wave of school accountability under which states draw on multiple measures to assess school quality. States have options in terms of how to weight components in their school quality indices and how many years of data to use to determine school ratings. In this study, we simulate school ratings…

On many college and university campuses, the idea of shared governance is often misunderstood and highly debated. The general problem addressed by this study was the lack of clarity regarding faculty's concept of shared governance within an Eastern North Carolina community college that can lead to faculty and administrative conflict. The purpose…

This comparative case study examined how performance funding programs shape the faculty experiences at two North Carolina Community Colleges. Using Principal-Agent Theory, Street-Level Bureaucracy, and Bottom-Up Policy Perspective as theoretical frameworks, six themes and four subthemes emerged from semi-structured interviews of twenty community…

In the U.S., state guidance to schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic was politicized. We used state-level political affiliation to explore whether access to curricular resources differed pre-pandemic or during pandemic remote teaching and teachers' reported control over curricular resources during pandemic teaching. We found that…

This qualitative case study explores how undocumented students in North Carolina navigate their identity, belonging, and decision-making about activist efforts. Drawing on fieldwork and interview data (2017-2019), we provide policy context and empirical evidence through the voices of undocumented youth about their everyday realities and dilemmas…

Summer melt occurs when a student who intends to go to college does not enroll in the fall semester after senior year. The purpose of this study was to examine why high school graduates, who in the spring of their senior year of high school had intentions to go to college, did not enroll in college the fall semester immediately after graduation…

A foundational goal of education is to create a citizenry capable of making well-informed decisions for themselves. Over recent decades in the United States, accountability models have been enacted that hold teachers and educational leaders responsible for student outcomes. Selected Literature seems to suggest that these accountability measures…

We use data from the applications North Carolina public school districts and charter schools submitted for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) to investigate the sense that educational leaders made of the pandemic as it unfolded. LEAs understood the pandemic as a multifaceted problem. Nearly all applications addressed four…

This examination of secondary agricultural education students' performance was used to determine if students could perform up to industry standards. In this study, the industry standard were blueprints created by engineers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Students had to fabricate a Cost-effective Roll-Over Protective…

Nationwide, school principals are given wide discretion to use disciplinary tools like suspension and expulsion to create a safe learning environment. There is legitimate concern that this power can have negative consequences, particularly for the students who are excluded. This study uses linked disciplinary, education, and criminal justice…