Participation in school sports has a variety of benefits for students. But not all students are able to participate in school athletics programs. In this column, Robert Kim explores the different levels of access suburban, urban, and rural students have to sports programs. And he considers whether students, regardless of where they live, have a…

BACKGROUND: School-based extracurricular activity participation is one of the primary avenues for prosocial activity engagement during adolescence. In this study, we test the "overscheduling hypothesis" or whether the negative relationship between structured activity intensity (ie, hours) and adolescent bullying and fighting levels off…

While place-based pedagogies and place-conscious education have received a great deal of attention in community literacy, these studies have often focused on classroom efforts at engaging students in their communities. This article articulates an extracurricular pedagogy of place through a historical study of a network of creative writing groups…

Digital badging continues to garner attention in the educational community. What remains to be seen is how badging will interact with traditional curricular elements. While concerns have been raised about using badges as extrinsic motivators in coursework, there are alternate areas of application for digital badging. Badges may actually serve to…

This "Equity by Design" brief highlights equity issues that arise in the process of reopening schools during a global pandemic. The authors examine state plans and guidance for reopening schools across states in the Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center (MAP EAC) region which includes the 13 states of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa,…

Public education funding relies on revenues from a variety of sources, from local taxpayers to federal programs targeting students with specific needs. The vast sum of funding collected--in excess of $600 billion annually--often masks which entities fund the education of our nation's youth. Questions of funding adequacy and equity across school…

Applying latent class and regression techniques to data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 997), this study explored the potential academic advantages of time spent in out-of-school activities. Of particular interest was how these potential advantages played out in relation to the timing and duration of activity…

One of the major components in the development of quality extracurricular athletic (ECA) programs that involves the infusion of students who have been classified as educationally disabled is the preparation of effective, high-quality physical educators who will assume coaching positions (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2012). These coaches…

The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) recently clarified that schools are required to provide students with disabilities (SWD) equal opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities (U.S. Department of Education [USDE] Office for Civil Rights, 2013). Schools have flexibility to design and expand extracurricular opportunities based on existing…

Both legislative and policy initiatives call upon schools to ensure students with disabilities access the breadth of learning and social opportunities available within the general education curriculum. Yet, relatively little is known about the most widely used approaches for fulfilling this mandate. The purpose of this study was to (a) explore how…

In Part III of the feature, physical educators and adapted physical educators offer current best practices as models of implementation for readers. Contributions included are: (1) Answer to the Dear Colleague Letter from the Anchorage School District's Adapted Sport Program (David Poulin); (2) Georgia's Adapted Physical Educators Response to the…

Although policymakers generally appreciate the value of crafting policies that are responsive to teacher and principal voice, doing so in a systematic way is challenging. Educator voices in the room when policies are made are often those of teachers and principals closest to policymakers. In 2019, to broaden the range of educator voices available…

Because of their commitment to the voluntary measurement and improvement of student learning outcomes, colleges and universities that are members of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) have been at the forefront of the national shift from teacher-centered to student-centered learning. The institutions participating in the CIC Degree…

Using data for all Wisconsin school districts over the 2003/04 through 2006/07 school years, we evaluate the state of Wisconsin's Open Enrollment (inter-district transfer) program to determine which school district characteristics influence parental transfer decisions. To our knowledge, this is the first study of school choice in a public school…

The mental health of today's college students continues to be a top-level concern for institutions of higher education, whether it is viewed from the perspective of staffing mental health services on campus, responding to after-hours crises in residence halls, providing accessible treatment with limited budgets, managing behavioral threats, or…