While new teachers bring energy and passion into their classrooms and schools, they can find themselves incredibly challenged as they learn how to plan and implement lessons, collect, and use data to inform their instructional practices, build relationships with students and families, manage classroom behavior, and meet the varying academic,…

Every adolescent faces challenges as they navigate their teenage years, but for some these challenges imperil their ability to complete their education. While these four students' experiences are dramatically different, they have one thing in common: high school didn't work for them, meaning that each faced long odds of ever attaining a diploma,…

Although minority-serving institutions (MSIs) educate nearly one fifth of the nation's college students, there is to date little research on MSI's return on investment (ROI). To address this, the University of Pennsylvania and Educational Testing Service commissioned four papers focusing on the ROI for MSIs, which were presented originally in…

Performance funding policies allocate state appropriations to public institutions based in part on retention and completion outcomes, and equity metrics allocate additional funding for graduating historically underserved students. Through interviews of 52 college administrators and state policymakers, I explore campus responses to performance…

This report analyzes how students were served by Benefits Access for College Completion (BACC), a 2.5-year initiative designed to increase access to public benefits (such as SNAP or Medicaid) for eligible low-income students. These crucial supports reduce students' unmet financial needs and help them finish school. Launched in 2011, BACC funded…

School administrators are in the best position, but often lack the knowledge, to help low-income, minority youth transition to college. Consequently, some youth are not meeting their full potential and there are long-term, deleterious consequences on local economies as wage earning potential stagnates. Using Aslanargun's, Farmer-Hinton's, and…

This report documents the efforts underway in 12 states and localities to tackle the enduring problem of African American, Native American, and Latino families faring worse than others being served by the child welfare systems. The publication, produced by Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) as part of the work of the Alliance for Racial…

A position paper released on December 5, 2014 by the Philadelphia School Advocacy Partners (PSAP), the advocacy arm of the Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP), calls for an "aggressive expansion of schools that are achieving results for low-income and minority students" (p. 2). The document describes what it terms…

The Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) provided states with newfound flexibility on accountability measures and school improvement strategies. Many policy experts have analyzed states' ESSA plans, which explain how states use their federal funds under various provisions of the new law, as well as the approaches states take to identify and rate…

Business leaders in Pennsylvania cannot find the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) talent they need to stay competitive. Students' lagging performance in K-12 is a critical reason why. The good news is that the nation's most effective STEM Education programs can help turn the tide. Pennsylvania students have made some gains…

In this article Gerald Campano, María Paula Ghiso, and Bethany J. Welch explore the role of ethical and professional norms in community-based research, especially in fostering trust within contexts of cultural diversity, systemic inequity, and power asymmetry. The authors present and describe a set of guidelines for community-based research that…

This article focuses on the increased power of venture philanthropy to shape education in urban communities of color in the USA. The author situates venture philanthropy's expanded influence in urban school districts in the nexus of urban disinvestment, neoliberal governance, wealth concentration, and economic crisis. The author argues that…

This article extends the literature on teachers' career paths by attending to the experiences of educators when they were students in secondary classrooms. Grounded in the perspective that biography is central to teaching, we investigate undergraduate pre-service teachers' educational experiences, views on teaching and learning, and professional…

It's undeniable that too many schools with high percentages of low-income students and students of color are low-achieving. But a few schools with these student populations stand out as successes, with academic achievement rivaling and exceeding that of their counterparts in middle-class communities. What do these schools have in common? Research…

Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education is the largest provider of higher education in the Commonwealth, with nearly 107,000 degree-seeking students and thousands more who are enrolled in certificate and other career-development programs. With almost 90 percent of students coming from Pennsylvania and the vast majority of graduates…