This Data Point examines the education and certification qualifications of public school mathematics and computer science teachers in the United States before COVID-19. It uses data from the public school teacher data file of the 2017-18 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS). This is a national sample survey of public and private K-12…

Using detailed admissions data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC cases, we examine how racial preferences for under-represented minorities (URMs) affect their admissions to Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill. At Harvard, the admit rates for typical African American applicants are on average over four times larger than if they had been…

Education policies have too often ignored how conditions outside of school can alter life chances for young people, especially students of color, before they even reach the classroom. More recently, COVID-19 has made it impossible to overlook the needs of the whole child, both inside and outside of school. The authors assert that responding to a…

This tenth annual High School Benchmarks Report provides updated data on high school graduates' college access, persistence, and completion outcomes. This report was designed with several features particularly tailored to secondary education practitioners and policymakers. First, results presented in this report update last years' findings on high…

Hip-hop, born after the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, is an expression and embodiment of liberation. This book explores the creative liberation, political liberation, and communicative liberation for youth as one exemplar of culturally sustaining pedagogy. The authors share what students and teachers learned in a high school class where…

Understanding how school districts allocate resources across students and schools is important for designing efficacious and equitable school finance policies. Newly released school-level spending data allow for new insights about the level of spending a student experiences at her school and how well spending corresponds with student…

Over the last 50 years, the US has experienced significant shifts in its racial and ethnic makeup, making it a much more racially diverse country than it was a half century ago. The racial and ethnic composition of the higher education system has shifted too. In spite of this progress, various forms of racial bias, socioeconomic inequality, and…

Steps taken to address racial inequality in the private sector and higher education are not always altruistic. This brief examines the economic impact of having a representative workforce, focusing on the state of North Carolina (NC). It discusses the importance of successful education programming designed to address issues related to Black,…

When it comes to providing children with a high-quality education, money matters. Research shows that sustained and significant increases in school funding can have a lasting positive impact on student achievement and other outcomes -- especially for students from low-income backgrounds. Yet, the U.S. education system is plagued with persistent…

The disparity in academic achievement in mathematics between White and non-White students has been documented across the country and discussed in depth in academic research. Ladson-Billings (2006) cited the "education debt" that the nation has allowed to grow as a source for this disparity. Anderson (2017) and Battey and Levey (2016)…

California Community Colleges (CCC) are integral in ensuring student enrollment, persistence, and subsequent higher education degree attainment. As one of the most affordable institutions of learning, community colleges symbolize access to various degree and certificate completion options, transfer opportunities, vocation and remedial education,…

This study addresses common assumptions about women of the borderlands while embracing a transformative consciousness in understanding, making, and reclaiming the meaning of citizenship for Mexican American women from the Rio Grande Valley. This critical ethnography recognizes Chicana Feminist epistemologies as a form of knowledge. Therefore, this…

Credit recovery programs are a form of alternative learning in which students have an additional opportunity to gain credit, or pass, a previously failed class by retaking the course, either in full or with key standards. Although little scientific research exists regarding the effectiveness of credit recovery, in addition to the short- and…

The concept of nanotechnology has existed since Richard Feynman's inaugural lecture at the California Institute of Technology in 1959. As a coined term, the honor went to Norio Taniguchi in 1974. Since those two epochs, like any other STEM field, there are two significant concentrations: how to teach it and what it means epistemologically as a…

Over the last decade the Bay Area region has witnessed a lack of diversity in Silicon Valley technology professions, a subject of current political and popular discourse. The California State University (CSU) system provides accessible higher education; the CSU system approach to accessible higher education affirms the distinctness of regions,…