The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004) entitles students who qualify for special education services to a free and appropriate education (FAPE) across all public education settings, including juvenile justice (JJ) facilities. JJ facilities have disproportionately higher rates of students with disabilities, who tend to experience…

Recent legislation through the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) has implications for school systems across the nation in creating and implementing a multi-tiered system of support. Pennsylvania has its own state legislation that also provides the language for schools to implement an MTSS framework that includes tiered support in academics through…

Enactment of the "Rehabilitation Act of 1973" and the "Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990" expanded and clarified the rights of students with disabilities in higher education (Connor, 2011; Pena, 2014; Troiano, 2003). In the past three decades, the enrollment rate of students with learning disabilities (LD) in higher…

In 2018, the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) enacted a new law called Act 44, which provided new form of funding for school safety in school districts across the State of Pennsylvania. The study focused on how school superintendents and high school principals prioritized each category in Pennsylvania Act 44 from highest to the lowest…

Title IX establishes in law equal opportunity for women in educational programs that receive financial support from the federal government. In higher education in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the misapplication of Title IX in college athletics is believed to have caused the termination of college wrestling programs that were otherwise…

Charter and cyber charter schools were legislatively permitted to operate as publicly funded educational institutions in Pennsylvania with the passage of Act 22 of 1997. Examining the tuition payments from traditional school districts funding charter schools and resulting economic, operational, and programmatic impacts on traditional K-12…

Changes in legislation including NCLB, RTT, and ESEA Flexibility Waivers have influenced the educational landscape. States and school districts have spent considerable time and resources to meet the mandates of this changing legislation, including the development of reporting systems and modification of principal evaluations systems. However, the…

The purpose of this embedded, mixed methods, research study was to acquire knowledge regarding the Pennsylvania Educator Effectiveness system while connecting teacher effectiveness with student achievement. The sample size consisted of five administrators and 18 public school teachers. The teachers taught mathematics in grades 4 through 8 at a…

Deemed the "broad safety net approach," reformation of statutory law Pennsylvania Act 126 of 2012, increased the education and training requirements for mandated reporters with the intentions to increase the number of children identified as abused and neglected. The purpose of this quantitative correlation study is to examine data from…

This mixed method study was a practitioner inquiry into the teacher evaluation system that was enacted as a result of Pennsylvania House Bill 1901 (Act 82 of 2012). The study was an effort to gain an in-depth understanding of (a) factors that led to the passage of the Act 82 teacher evaluation policy, (b) what the policy was intended to do, and…

Between 2011 and 2015, K-12 education experienced an infusion of funds by the U.S. Department of Education going directly to school districts that implemented reforms in key areas to address truancy, dropout and achievement in our nation's most severely underperforming schools. There is limited research studying truancy reduction, relationship…

The purpose of this study is to interview high school teachers of English Language Arts and special educators who are partners in a co-teaching model. It is important to understand the perceptions of teachers using co-teaching models to learn about the strengths of the program, as well as areas for improvement. In 1975, public education changed…

In response to federal accountability measures, the Pennsylvania Department of Education introduced the School Performance Profile, shifting the student achievement spotlight from school districts to individual schools, thus placing the onus squarely on the shoulders of teachers and school leaders. Shared leadership has been touted in the…

In Pennsylvania, Act 82 of 2012 introduced the Educator Effectiveness system and its foundational belief that student achievement is the result of teachers' high quality instruction and principals' high quality school leadership. With the heightened expectations of principal and teacher accountability for student achievement, principals positively…

This study examined differences in grade school students' BMI percentiles before and after the "Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act" of 2012 and factors that may have influenced those differences. Using publically available data from the Pennsylvania Departments of Health and Education, a comparative analysis of BMI percentiles, ethnicity,…