The Pittsburgh Promise is a scholarship program that provides $5,000 per year toward college tuition for public high school graduates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who earned a 2.5 GPA and a 90% attendance record. This study used a difference-in-difference design to assess whether the introduction of the Promise scholarship program directly…

Recent evidence suggests that the neighborhood context, particularly for urban youth, can influence a range of outcomes. This study makes contributions to the field by examining how the neighborhood context directly relates to missing school. To do so, this study employs a large-scale, longitudinal data set of multilevel observations for entire…

This mixed methods study design explored the contributing factors to chronic tardiness, tardy behavior, and the impact on the secondary student. School tardiness is a growing problem and has been on a steady upward trend, as reported by the U.S. Department of Education. Tardiness and tardy behavior are consistently influencing the educational…

As charter school waitlists around the United States continue to grow, it is important to analyze the factors that are possibly attracting parents away from the traditional public school setting and into the charter school system. Using waitlist data from Pennsylvania to proxy for parental valuation, the article examines numerous factors that…

The current study was completed through a retrospective analysis of school records of elementary school students in the Northeast Region of the Philadelphia School District (PSD) who have participated in the Fast ForWord (FFW) Language program. The data requested from student records included: demographic information (e.g., gender, grade, age,…

This study investigated the unique relations between school concentrations of student risk factors and measures of reading, mathematics, and attendance. It used an integrated administrative data system to create a combined data set of risks (i.e., birth risks, teen mother, low maternal education, homelessness, maltreatment, and lead exposure) for…