Research has shown that inequitable participation in computer science education is an occupational injustice for students with disabilities, as it is an unfair and inequitable distribution of occupational opportunities. There is limited information regarding how schools' capacity for and access to computer science education relates to the…

Art Education is vital to rounded skill-growth in students and schools. The skills learned in art education are transferable to the academic subjects students work in, and to their lives outside the school. In the United States of America, resources and accessibility to in-depth art education vary widely. The experiences between students in…

The purpose of this quantitative research study was to examine the enrollment trends of racial minority and low socioeconomic enrollment, and the equity of higher education access at a four-year private institution in western Pennsylvania. The study concentrated on two student populations over a five-year period at a four-year private institution…

Access to public charter schools could theoretically reduce school safety problems by increasing competitive pressures, improving matches between schools and students, enhancing discipline policies, and allowing students to relocate to peer groups and cultures that discourage risky behaviors. Using publicly available data from the Pennsylvania…

Definitions of teacher experience vary by state and research study. Most states consider a teacher inexperienced if they have between 1-5 years of experience in the classroom as full-time educator. Pennsylvania's 2015 plan identified inexperienced teachers as those with one or less years of teaching experience, but the federal Civil Rights Data…

This brief presents findings describing how Pennsylvania compares to other states in providing its students with access to educational opportunity. Following a more detailed discussion of the indicators used to define educational opportunity, Pennsylvania's rankings on overall access are first examined and then how Pennsylvania compares to other…

District leaders seeking to close schools often frame decisions as "right-sizing" or "modernizing the footprint" of the district. Historical influences such as population and economic shifts and desegregation during the civil rights era, and more recent factors like deteriorating building conditions, school performance…

Decades of chronic underfunding and inequitable funding have been spiraling Pennsylvania's public school system into crisis--failing kids and threatening the future of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth Court has ruled that the state's current funding system for K-12 schools is unconstitutional and the state must take action to adequately and…

There are deep and often institutionalized root causes for persistent equity gaps in postsecondary access and attainment in the United States. Many data sources, as well as the dozens of practitioners interviewed for this paper, affirm this. The majority of K-12 public school students are now students of color, and the U.S. Census Bureau estimates…

This study employed hierarchical piecewise growth modeling and two interrupted time series models to examine the effect of introducing an Advanced Placement (AP) school accountability incentive on AP access in Pennsylvania. Specifically, we examined whether adoption of an advanced course access accountability indicator was associated with an…

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association's (SHEEO) "Communities of Practice" project builds upon SHEEO's ongoing efforts to measure the capacity and effective use of state postsecondary data systems and provides states with opportunities to develop solutions to common issues with those systems. The sixth Community of…

Close to 3,000 students in Allegheny County public schools were identified as experiencing homelessness during the 2018-19 school year, or 2.0% of the total student population. Meanwhile, homelessness rates have been growing in recent years and lost income due to COVID-19 is likely to bring even more students to the point of housing and…

This case illustrates the importance for school leaders and teachers to be knowledgeable about current legal precedent when creating district and school policies. We describe a legal battle that occurred in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in which a school district instituted a policy affecting English learners that was in violation of two federal laws.…

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education commissioned WestEd to develop a guide on using quality authorizing to promote high-quality charter schools. At the time, notions about how authorizers could contribute to the existence of such schools were in their infancy, and the publication, which profiles the oversight practices of eight selected…

Pennsylvania's students consistently score above the national average on overall student achievement. However, the state's achievement gaps between White students and Black and Hispanic students are consistently among the worst in the country, even when controlling for gaps in family income, poverty, unemployment, and parental educational…