The marketization of U.S. schools has increasingly complicated and even undermined the democratic aims of education, causing many to argue that democratic and market ideologies are fundamentally opposed. This meta-ethnographic study uses conceptual tools from democratic theory and the research on civic education to investigate how leaders in one…

Though part of the larger public school system, charter schools typically do not operate in school buildings and are not always mandated to follow the same rules and regulations for school districts, which can make planning efforts for funding, facilities, and emergency management difficult to navigate. Charter schools typically receive per pupil…

The American School District Panel (ASDP) is the newest addition to the RAND Corporation's American Educator Panels (AEP), which are designed to survey educators several times each year. RAND recruits ASDP members using probabilistic sampling methods, which allow researchers to weight survey results to generalize to the national population of…

Demand for charter schools is declining. In sixteen of the forty-one states that have published 2021-2022 enrollment numbers, charter school enrollment has dropped, in some cases, by substantial amounts. In an additional six states, charter enrollment has stalled with increases of fewer than 200 students in charter schools across the state. Using…

Family involvement has been shown to have positive effects on the academic and socio-emotional and behavioral outcomes of school-aged children across all age ranges, but most especially among elementary-aged students. The Family Involvement Questionnaire-Elementary (FIQ-E) has been validated for use with students in grades 1-6 across public and…

Parental and family engagement are critical parts of a child's educational journey. This is especially true in the Response to Intervention (RTI) process whereby students receive academic, and behavior supports and interventions before referral to special education. An absence of parental input in the RTI process could lead to students being…

Parental involvement is well-documented in the literature. Although research suggests a strong positive association between parental involvement and children's educational outcomes, few studies have examined parental involvement at home with children who attend charter schools, especially with small immigrant groups such as the Hmong. Therefore,…

Challenges to teaching in the post-COVID classroom plagued schools across the globe. This qualitative study followed two middle-school teachers in a charter school located in the Western United States to identify the changes to classroom teaching and their effects on the classroom environment through the first year of teaching after the 2020…

COVID-19 placed a significant burden on urban students of color and their families. Changing environmental, community, and schooling factors influenced students' ability and desire to attend school regularly. To ensure that students would attend school, district and school leaders were challenged with creating school environments and cultures that…

While charter schools offer families additional choices for their children's educational experiences, they are not exempt from the racial and economic disparities deeply embedded in the American education system. Community leaders and educators often point to policies regarding curriculum, access, and instruction as areas of opportunity to rectify…

Summit Public Schools (SPS), a California-based charter school network established in 2003, is widely promoted nationally as a success story to be emulated. A policy environment friendly to charter schools and digital technologies, together with hundreds of millions of dollars in technology industry contributions, enabled its growth and its…

Many U.S. cities with school choice programs have adopted unified enrollment systems to manage their application and placement processes centrally. Typically, these systems use placement algorithms to assign students to schools. These algorithms make placements based on families' rank-ordered requests, seat availability in schools, and various…

Many cities with school choice programs employ algorithms to make school placements. These algorithms use student priorities to determine which applicants get seats in oversubscribed schools. This study explores whether the New Orleans placement algorithm tends to favor students of certain races or socioeconomic classes. Specifically, we examine…

Childhood trauma is a worldwide issue impacting children as young as toddlers and infants. Children exposed to traumatic events are at a greater risk of having cognitive and academic concerns. Additionally, children impacted by trauma are more likely to exhibit internalizing and externalizing behaviors than their peers who have not been exposed to…

Retaining stakeholders within school districts following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic presented a significant challenge. This quantitative correlational study aimed to investigate whether there is a positive correlation between school district servant leadership (administrators, principals, assistant superintendent, superintendent, etc.)…