"Changing Course: Public School Enrollment Shifts During the Pandemic" is an analysis of student enrollment trends in public schools during the pandemic (2019-20 to 2021-22 school years). The numbers showed more than 240,000 students enrolled in charter schools, a 7% increase--while district public schools lost approximately 1.5 million…

It is widely believed that there is a crisis of confidence in law enforcement in the United States. What remains to be seen, however, is whether adolescents actually differentiate between legal authorities and other types of authorities. Leveraging cross-sectional, nationally representative data of 12th graders from every year from 2006 to 2017…

Many students are enrolled in segregated school systems with unequal access to resources. In this report, we present a measure that can help policymakers identify the schools in their system that are contributing the most to segregation. How our measure differs from traditional metrics: Much research on segregation relies on an absolute measure of…

Prior research suggests that parents of Hispanics, English learners, and students living in poverty exercise school choice less frequently than other parents, which may be a factor in the resegregation of public schools. This quasi-experimental, causal-comparative design tests whether ethnicity, language dominance, or socioeconomic status of the…

The Kauffman School is a public, tuition-free charter school serving Kansas City students. In the 2019-20 school year, the school enrolled 1,186 students in grades 5 through 12. Most (88 percent) of the students were low income, and 89 percent were Black or Hispanic. To measure the impact of the Kauffman School on its students, the authors…

As the anniversary of "Brown v. Board of Education" decision arrives again without any major initiatives to mitigate spreading and deepening segregation in the nation's schools, the Civil Rights Project adds to a growing national discussion with a research brief drawn from a much broader study of school segregation to be published in…

Private schools have a long and important tradition in U.S. education and have been the focus of a great deal of political controversy in recent years. There is deep division among Americans over the desirability of using public funds to finance vouchers for private education--an issue that has become the leading educational goal of the Trump…

This report uses the Civil Rights Data Collection dataset released in early 2012 to raise questions and drive debate about the subject of teacher absence. This dataset comes from the first national survey to include school-level information on teacher absence. The measure constructed from this information is the percentage of teachers who were…

This summary uses the Civil Rights Data Collection dataset released in early 2012 to raise questions and drive debate about the subject of teacher absence. This dataset comes from the first national survey to include school-level information on teacher absence. The measure constructed from this information is the percentage of teachers who were…

Texas and other states that border with Mexico have been leading indicators of public school system trends that may manifest themselves in other areas of the United States in the decade to come. Such manifestations of these trends are likely to have both policy and practice implications. Descriptive statistics and longitudinal data from the…

This case begins with a contextual overview of the educational plight of Latino students in U.S. public schools. This pervasive plight has economic and social implications in the lives of these students. Using a Borderlands Cultural Wealth framework, the case focuses on the educational challenges of Mexican American and immigrant students in one…

At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. This is the second study of student achievement in global perspective prepared under the auspices of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). In the 2010…

The national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) monitors priority health risk behaviors that contribute to the leading causes of death, disability, and social problems among youth and adults in the United States. The national YRBS is conducted every two years during the spring semester and provides data representative of 9th through 12th grade…

This report provides a detailed portrait of Hispanic and White academic achievement gaps and how students' performance has changed over time at both the national and state levels. The report presents achievement gaps using reading and mathematics assessment data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for the 4th- and 8th-grade…

Research shows that Hispanic second language students are not as successful as their English-speaking peers in school. The problem is in part due to several factors: curriculum deliverance in a foreign language, cultural differences, and family/school disconnect. Current census reports reveal that Hispanic populations in the United States, and…