The resolution of educational disparities for Hispanic students is a continual endeavor embedded deeply in historical, societal, and educational norms. Without deliberate structural and systematic initiatives, these educational inequities cannot be eliminated. This interpretive qualitative study delved into how New York state suburban,…

While most community colleges admit all students who apply for admission, the vast majority have required students to demonstrate specified levels of literacy and numeracy before they can take college-level courses. Typically, students have been assessed using a single placement test, such as the College Board's ACCUPLACER. Colleges--or sometimes…

In the United States, almost one-quarter of all youth are children of immigrants and it is projected that by 2040 over a third of all children will be growing up in immigrant households (Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 2010). This shift in demographics has the potential to compound the inability that many school districts demonstrate to…

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…

In this report, the authors examine the many ways Black and Latino students are locked out of the advanced coursework opportunities that can set them up for success in college and careers. Herein, they paint a picture at both national and state levels of how these students are denied access to meaningful advanced coursework opportunities, from…

While new teachers bring energy and passion into their classrooms and schools, they can find themselves incredibly challenged as they learn how to plan and implement lessons, collect, and use data to inform their instructional practices, build relationships with students and families, manage classroom behavior, and meet the varying academic,…

Background/Context: Although millions of undocumented students are enrolled in and guaranteed free public K-12 education, their postsecondary education opportunities are stifled. Some of the barriers encountered by undocumented students include discriminatory public policies, limited availability of information and insensitive college choice…

The compatibility of school choice policies and educational equity goals is one of the most hotly debated issues in education today. Yet, despite the growing population of children of immigrants in US schools, limited research exists on the relationship between parental nativity and participation in school choice from an equity perspective. This…

This article examines the high school search activities, choices, and final assignments of academically similar, but ethnically and socioeconomically different, eighth-grade students attending one New York City middle school. Despite being comparable candidates for admission to academically competitive high schools, the middle-class children of…

Inequality in educational outcomes is a frequent topic of policy debate. This paper investigates one potential source of educational inequality--school safety. With panel survey data of middle school students, this paper estimates racial gaps in student feelings of safety in the classroom, in the hallways, and outside the school building, and how…

The nation's goal of achieving educational equity has been both elusive and complex. U.S. schools are becoming more, not less, segregated, and the racial isolation of Black and Latino students from White students is a national trend. For two decades, the Rockville Centre School District in New York has engaged in reforms that were designed to…

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…

The State University of New York is America's largest comprehensive public university system, with sixty-four campuses, including community colleges, colleges of technology, university colleges, research universities, medical schools, academic medical centers, and specialized campuses in fields as diverse as optometry, ceramics, horticulture,…

The most recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools found that 74% of Americans believe that the achievement gap between white students and African American and Hispanic students is primarily due to factors unrelated to the quality of schooling that children receive. This assumption is supported by…

Americans know that Black and Latino children, by and large, are not reaching their full potential when it comes to learning and academic performance. But there are exceptions. The question that's being increasingly asked is how and why exceptions can become the norm. In the half century since the Brown v. Board decision, there remains a wide…