This memorandum provides information pertinent to the participation and performance of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examinations for 2021 graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). In 2021, 66.6 percent of MCPS graduates took one or more AP exams, a rate that was 23.0 and 31.7 percentage points higher…

The current study examines the association between risk behaviors and victimization and race-based victimization amongst U.S.-born and foreign-born Asian, Black, and Latinx adolescents. Data were derived from the U.S. subset of the 2009-2010 Health Behavior in School-aged Children study. Samples include 662 Asian, 2413 Black, and 3188 Latinx…

In this dissertation, I empirically investigate the changes in the market structure after new entrants, and how these changes affect the welfare of market participants. In Chapter 1, using records for public and charter schools in New York City, I empirically show that public schools adjusted after charter schools entered the neighborhood. I…

Although recent research has reported equity gains in the university-level physics classroom, there remains evidence of significant inequities by race. We conducted a series of multiple linear regressions to examine the magnitude of these inequities in introductory mechanics final exam scores. When we followed a common method of grouping students…

Children's books support children's development, but many factors influence interest in engaging with books, including book physical features. Additionally, the lack of diverse children's books makes it difficult to determine whether racial characters influence children's book preferences. This study utilized a forced-choice selection task to…

Objective: We examined differences and associations between physical fitness and behavioral factors with obesity in a multi-ethnic student population. Participants: Study population included non-Hispanic whites (NHW, n = 1,454); Hispanics (n = 1,436) and Asians (n = 1,016) at a metropolitan university from Fall 2006 to Fall 2013. Methods: Analyses…

New York City's universal prekindergarten (pre-K) program, which increased full-day enrollment from 19,000 to almost 70,000 children, is ambitious in both scale and implementation speed. We provide new evidence on the distribution of pre-K quality in New York City by student race/ethnicity, and investigate the extent to which observed differences…

Some states have enacted inclusive policies that reduce constraints and uncertainty for undocumented students, potentially changing their academic decisions and postsecondary goals. We explore shifts in continuing undocumented community college students' course-taking before and after the California DREAM Act, which provided access to state…

New Jersey's School Funding Reform Act (SFRA) is a "weighted" funding formula, designed to deliver adequate funding based on the unique student needs in every school district across the state. The SFRA included key elements to address long-standing racial and socio-economic disparities in New Jersey's public school system, most notably…

Adolescents are most likely to receive mental health services in schools compared to other settings; however, few studies have examined barriers to mental health help seeking at school for ethnic minority adolescents. The current mixed-methods study utilized surveys and semi-structured interviews to explore the mental health literacy (MHL),…

Families today are using culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP)--a social justice pedagogy that incorporates marginalized cultural practices into the classroom--to cultivate their children into future cosmopolitan professionals. Asian American, black, and Latinx families rationalize that CRP helps their children learn "a little bit of…

The Hispanic-Serving Community Colleges STEM Pipelines (HSCC-STEM) study is a research project that explores the transitions to and through Hispanic-serving two-year institutions for underrepresented minoritized STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students. This brief uncovers the most viable HSCC STEM pathways for Latinx…

Racial/ethnic educational disparities remain a pervasive and intractable issue facing the U.S. education system. To eliminate these disparities, educational research must consistently attend to race/ethnicity, particularly when examining the effects of educational practices, programs, and policies. The goal of the current review was to examine the…

Conversations over who should be identified as gifted continue perpetually both within the field and in the popular media. In this article, we focus on the use of local norms as one approach to gifted identification that can increase the equity of advanced educational programs and services while also better achieving their stated purpose of…

This paper examines data from the Digest of Educational Statistics and other sources to investigate Latinx educational achievement rates between 2005 and 2019. After comparing educational attainment rates from white, Black, Latinx, and Asian students, the paper documents the improvement in education among Latinx students in recent years despite…