We conducted focus groups with high school staff, students, parents and administrators to gain information about how to design professional development training supporting high school staff in implementing restorative practices within a multi-tiered support system. Results indicated that all stakeholders valued trust and relationship building, and…

Critical consciousness (CC) has emerged as a framework for understanding how low-income and racial/ethnic minority youth recognize, interpret, and work to change the experiences and systems of oppression that they face in their daily lives. Despite this, relatively little is known about how youths' experiences with economic hardship and structural…

"G[superscript 2]ROW STEM" is an Investing in Innovation (i3) development grant funded by the Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. "G[superscript 2]ROW STEM" targets high-need middle school students, particularly females and minorities, that tend to be underrepresented in STEM careers.…

Parents who are knowledgeable of special education are more likely to engage in their child's education. Parents seek information about special education from a number of sources including State Departments of Education (SDEs). However, little is known about the web-based special education resources SDEs provide to parents. We sought to address…

This review examines four books that may offer some insight into what the discussion about educational policy, reform, and performance may look like after the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Collectively, "The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling" by Jal Mehta,…

Persistent school segregation may allow advantaged groups to hoard educational opportunities and consign minority students to lower-quality educational experiences. Although minority students are concentrated in low-achieving schools, relatively little previous research directly links segregation to measures of school quality based on student…

Children from under-resourced communities regularly enter formal schooling lagging behind their peers. These deficits in areas such as language development, reading readiness, and even in the kind of spatial skills that predict later mathematical knowledge, may persist throughout their lifespan. To address such gaps, policymakers have focused…

With a qualitative approach drawing from four focus groups, this study explored what aspects of preschool are valued most by 30 low-income Latino/a immigrant parents with children enrolled in a state-funded preschool program in Texas. Beyond the push and pull factors of necessity, convenience, and supply, parents reported valuing the…

Are equal educational opportunities sufficient to narrow long-standing economic and racial inequalities in achievement? In this paper, I test the hypothesis that poor and minority students benefit less from effective elementary school teachers than their non-poor and White peers, thus exacerbating inequalities. I use administrative data from…

Supportive relationships with adults at school are critical to student engagement in adolescence. Additional research is needed to understand how students' racial backgrounds interact with the school context to shape their perceptions of school support. This study employed multilevel, latent variable methods with a sample of Black and White…

In the context of a large-scale randomized controlled trial, our team investigated "front line" teaching issues as schools implemented a fully digital, blended learning curriculum in mathematics. This paper focuses on observations of instruction within schools that were assigned to use the new digital resources. Compared to a…

Charter schools have seen a nearly tripling in students, with approximately 3.1 million students enrolled in 2016-2017. As of 2017, 1 in 8 African American students attended a charter school in the United States. This article provides a conceptual introduction to a special issue on equity issues within the charter school movement, with a…

As interventions show promise for reducing school discipline disparities, it is important to understand what variables increase educators' commitment toward addressing racial equity in schools. In-depth interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of 15 educators asked to describe pivotal events that shifted their own or others' active…

We present a dynamic systems perspective for the intensification of interventions for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). With this framework, we suggest behavior involves the contributions of multiple factors and reflects the interplay between the characteristics of the student and the ecologies in which he or she is embedded.…

English learners (ELs), students from a home where a language other than English is spoken and who are in the process of developing English proficiency themselves, represent over 10% of the US student population. Oftentimes education policies and practices create barriers for ELs to achieve access and outcomes that are equitable to those of their…