This article calls into question the view that educational expansion has a causal effect on class-based inequalities of educational opportunity. This view, the impetus for many studies, is flawed because the empirical literature is hampered by poor measures of expansion and because it rests on simplistic understandings of the causal structure that…

This technical brief is part of an ongoing series the Center for Learner Equity (CLE) launched in 2015 that examines the enrollment and experiences of students with disabilities in different school settings. Using the 2017-2018 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) data released earlier this year, this brief focuses on the number and percentages of…

Many regional public universities (RPUs) provide college access to diverse groups of undergraduate students and face pressures to pursue prestige in the academic hierarchy. Prior research posits that RPUs will strive for prestige because of status- and resource-based rewards that flow from increasing their admissions selectivity,…

Access issues are pivotal to almost all charter school tensions and debates. How well are these schools performing? Are they segregating and stratifying? Are they public and democratic? Are they fairly funded? Can apparent successes be scaled up? Answers to all these core questions hinge on how access to charter schools is shaped. This book…

In "Delivering Promise," award-winning scholar of higher education Xueli Wang tells a story of educational change and innovation that has and continues to occur at countless campuses of community and technical colleges. Wang weaves together a careful account of how faculty, staff, administrators, institutional researchers, and college…

This article explores the relationship between school choice, student mobility and school segregation in Barcelona. The case of Barcelona is particularly interesting because the school admissions policy combines a particular design of catchment area with a significant level of choice options. We work on students and school register datasets for…

Recent headlines describing the national drop in public school enrollment suggest that this is a shocking crisis brought on or worsened by the pandemic. However, Abbie Cohen argues that the current enrollment decline should not be a surprise. The underlying causes have festered for decades. Among these causes is the tension between the different…

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the way that families and policymakers view K-12 education. Learning loss is having an outsized impact on students who were furthest from opportunity before the pandemic. And families are increasingly looking for new educational options for their children. For decades, access to educational options…

Background/Context: This article examines a 2011 court case in which an Ohio state court convicted and jailed a poor, single, Black mother of two school-aged children for "stealing an education." Using a false address, the mother, Kelley Williams-Bolar, enrolled her daughters in a public school district that was more privileged and amply…

More historically White institutions of higher education are compelled to respond, in some way, to increased activism and awareness of continued legacies of racism and racial crises on campuses. The author suggests that how schools wrestle with their legacies of racism and/or respond to student demands to right racial wrongs on campus might be…

This study provides an analysis of special education data from the United States and from the United Kingdom (England) to examine national trends and to provide a research baseline for benchmarking. After years of steady increases in the US and England, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) enrollments and statements of special…

The article reviews the concept of vulnerability and develops a framework for vulnerability to education inequality (VEI). It further reviews the concept of education inequality and develops a framework for the cumulative measuring instruments of inequality of education. The schooling vulnerability processes are developed to understand the…

The Roma are facing serious disadvantages in education in Romania, where segregated schooling and lack of quality education are two main factors contributing to de facto exclusion from the education system. In an effort to compensate for this missing commitment of the formal education system, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) provide…

States and districts allocate hundreds of billions of dollars annually to fund K-12 schools, and this allocation is largely driven by one calculation: how states count student enrollment. They do this in one of five ways: (1) A single count on a single day; (2) Two counts twice per year; (3) Multiple counts over a period of time; (4) An attendance…

We exploit differences in state special education funding systems based on special education enrollment ('bounty systems') or on total student enrollment ('census systems') to assess whether funding systems impact teacher turnover, teacher specialty, special education enrollment, state education spending, average class sizes, and teacher effort.…