The COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted the functioning of U.S. public schools, potentially changing the relative appeal of alternatives such as homeschooling and private schools. We study changes in families' choices of school sector using longitudinal student-level administrative data from Michigan and nationally representative data from the…

Parental involvement at school offers unique opportunities for parents, and this school-based involvement has important implications for children's academic and behavioral outcomes. The authors used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (National Center for Education Statistics, 2001) to examine race and immigrant…

Hispanics account for over one-fifth of newborns in the United States. Hispanic children, on average, achieve at lower levels from kindergarten forward than the non-Hispanic White majority and Asian Americans. Increasing the percentage of Hispanic children who enter kindergarten "ready" for school constitutes one of the nation's most…

Over the past three decades, enrollment in full-day kindergarten has grown considerably--from roughly one-tenth to just over half of US kindergartners today. Full-day kindergarten reappeared first in the 1960s as an intervention designed to help disadvantaged children ''catch up'' to their peers through additional schooling. More recently, it has…

There is considerable debate about the relative importance of family versus school factors in producing academic and nonacademic student outcomes, and whether and how their impacts vary across different student groups. In addition to critically reviewing and synthesizing earlier work, this study extends the literature by (a) using the ECLS-K, a…

This study investigated the contributions of maternal education and ethnicity to three dimensions of home-based parental involvement in young children's education and development: parental expectations about educational attainment, children's activities at home and outside the home, and family routines. Controlling for family background variables…