After years of enrolling high numbers of Hispanic/Latinx students, Northern Arizona University (NAU) gained Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) status in Spring 2021. The institution currently enrolls a Hispanic/Latinx community of 25%. However, servingness is not accurately reflected through percentages alone. Rather, a university that engages in…

The last few decades have seen increasing attacks on educators' right to participate in formal unions. Given the all-time low of formal union power in the United States and the success of anti-union efforts (Shelton, 2017), how and why have the educator uprisings manifested so intensely in the last few years? This article draws, in part, on a…

Informed by interviews with campus administrators and Northern Arizona University (NAU) students, the "Student Success is the DNA of NAU" case study outlines strategies this public, four-year, Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) is employing to build NAU into an engine of opportunity for students and the communities they represent. The…

In the past 20 years, both school choice policies and dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs have proliferated across the US. This project examines the intersection of the two trends, examining how school choice policies have shaped DLBE at the district, school, and program level, through the eyes of 22 public school administrators in…

Arizona has played a large part in the development and implementation of policy that directly inhibits equity of opportunity for the English learner (EL) population, the largest and most damaging of which came out of legislation passed due to the "Flores v. Arizona" case which concluded in 2015. This research article seeks to critically…

This report provides an overview of key provisions in Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), discusses how Arizona's ESSA plan addresses accountability for Latino students and English Learners (ELs), and provides recommendations to Arizona's accountability system to better ensure that Latino and EL students in Arizona are receiving a high-quality…

Emerging practices in both K-12 and higher education hold great promise in the establishment of equity frameworks. The use of finely disaggregated data, the effort to track additional student groups, and related work, all help to establish policies and tools to monitor the impact of reform efforts to address inequities. State programs and…

We present case studies of elementary school leaders in an Arizona district with a large enrollment of Latinx Spanish-speaking students who qualify for English language development services. The Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Leadership dimensions are used as a lens to examine how school leaders navigate Arizona's restrictive language…

This chapter proposes a conceptual framework that merges intersectionality and policy analysis as an analytical tool to understand the nuanced, multilayered, compounded educational inequality encountered specifically by low-income, Latino Spanish-speaking students in Arizona K-12 public schools as a function of intersecting educational policies.…

In 2009, Excelencia in Education launched the Ensuring America's Future initiative to inform, organize, and engage leaders in a tactical plan to increase Latino college completion. An executive summary of Latino College Completion in 50 states synthesizes information on 50 state factsheets and builds on the national benchmarking guide. Each…

Seven years after the Civil Rights Project first documented extensive patterns of charter school segregation, the charter sector continues to stratify students by race, class and possibly language. This study is released at a time of mounting federal pressure to expand charter schools, despite on-going and accumulating evidence of charter school…

This Congressional hearing on the Bilingual Education Act examines current law and changes necessary to ensure that it provides limited English speaking students with the best possible educational opportunities. After opening statements by Chairman Michael Castle and Representative Carlos Romero-Barcelo, both of the Subcommittee on Early…

This report provides data on the academic achievement gap that separates low-income and minority students from other students, examining how well different groups of students perform in Arizona and noting inequities in teacher quality, course offerings, and funding. Included are tables and data that provide: a frontier gap analysis (a comparison…

This report compares Arizona's reading and mathematics performance on the most recent administrations of the state assessment with performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). To indicate how Arizona is doing in narrowing the academic achievement gap between African American, Latino, or low-income students and their…