Students in the foster care system tend to have lower educational outcomes than their peers, including more frequent disciplinary events. However, few studies have explored how transitions into and out of foster care placements are associated with educational outcomes. Using longitudinal data from four California school districts, this study…

Growth mindset has been shown to predict academic achievement in a variety of student populations, though the strength of the relationship can vary depending on the characteristics of the students examined. Using a large-scale sample of middle school students from a diverse district in the United States, we examine how multiple facets of students'…

Viewed through a social justice lens, preschool expulsion is an educational equity issue. This study focused on prior expulsion from preschool and child-care in a longitudinal study of 203 autistic children, ages 4 to 7. By parent report, 16%--one out of six autistic children--had been expelled from a preschool or child-care setting prior to…

Improving graduation rates is one of the biggest missions in many universities across the country and it is surely the case on the campus of this institution. The work here presents a statistical tool box to use early academic performance as a predictor for graduation with logistic regression and machine learning techniques. The methods described…

This memo adds to the growing literature on the transition to college for young people in foster care, focusing specifically on issues of preparedness to enter higher education. First, the authors assess the extent to which youths' perceptions of their own educational preparedness and their child welfare workers' perceptions of their educational…

This article addresses long-standing data from federal government agencies documenting concerns regarding the use of school discipline and suspension indicating that Black students are referred for discipline and/or suspended at a higher rate than students of other ethnicities. Available data from a local school district reflected similar…

For schools and teachers to help students develop knowledge and skills, students need to show up to class. Yet absenteeism is prevalent, especially in secondary schools. This study uses a rich data set tracking class attendance by day for over 50,000 middle and high school students from an urban district in academic years 2007-2008 through…

Because children with visual impairments tend to be inactive, they are 1.5 times more likely to be considered overweight or obese than are their sighted peers. Although some barriers to physical activity have been identified (for example, lack of opportunity and transportation issues); little has been done to empirically identify predictors of…

Many districts and schools are having difficulty implementing Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) in school settings. This quantitative study set out to examine the stage of MTSS implementation schools are at and identify factors from the implementation science framework that account for the different reported student outcomes related to MTSS…

According to national indicators of adolescent health and well-being, the most significant health issues young people face are related to mental health. In San Mateo County, a recent report on adolescent health frames the prevalence of mental health needs among public school students as "staggering." Both locally and nationally, schools…

Identifying factors that influence adolescents' decisions to start smoking is necessary to improve interventions for reducing tobacco use. The current longitudinal study was designed to determine the direction of influence between feelings of invulnerability to harm and cigarette smoking, and to test whether the perceived risks and benefits of…

According to national indicators of adolescent health and well-being, mental health is one of the most significant health issues young people face. Since mental health is linked to other aspects of health and well-being, undiagnosed and untreated mental health conditions can negatively impact a young person's social-emotional health, academic…

Although there is substantial evidence of the negative effects of being incarcerated or having a father imprisoned, there is little research on the spillover effects created by the concentration of incarceration within disadvantaged communities. This article addresses this limitation by investigating the association between mass incarceration and…

Students often drink alcohol at their highest levels in college. It is suggested that students with the most severe drinking problems begin drinking by or in high school, but studies on high school drinking tend to focus on students who have academic problems and are not college-bound. The purpose of this study was to examine high school drinking…

Gridley Unified School District serves just over 2,000 students across five schools in a small rural town in the upper Sacramento Valley. The median annual household income in Gridley is just over 60% of the state average. Gridley Unified is one of seven districts studied by researchers at the Learning Policy Institute in a mixed-methods study…