Administrative burden, or the frictions individuals experience in accessing public programs, has implications for whether and which eligible individuals receive aid. While prior research documents barriers to accessing federal financial aid, less is known about the extent to which state aid programs impose administrative burden, how administrative…

Health coverage rates among undergraduate and graduate students have increased since the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, from an estimated 81 percent in 2010 to 92 percent in 2022, according to GAO's analysis of Census data. However, as of 2022, an estimated 1.6 million students still lacked coverage, including…

Women are the majority population in Texas that participate in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and public housing assistance programs. TANF focuses on mandatory work requirements with a time-limit on assistance and lack of education opportunities. This dissertation documents post-secondary education opportunities for Texas women…

This position paper identifies the complexity of the special education teacher (SET) shortage and the social injustices of the already marginalized population of students with disabilities (SWD). Nationally, policy reforms and teacher certification initiatives may have unknowingly perpetuated the shortage of SET in an attempt to increase the…

Access to high-quality early care and education (ECE) supports healthy child development, accelerates academic achievement, reduces educational inequality, and catalyzes economic growth. The benefits of ECE are even greater among economically disadvantaged children, children with disabilities, and multilingual learners. However, despite these…

Early childhood educator's emotional socialization may contribute crucially to young children's social-emotional competence. Here, we examined the contributions of self-reported reactions to children's emotions and beliefs about emotional socialization of 90 teachers to the social-emotional competence of 334 pre-schoolers. Teacher-reported emotion…