Community schools serve as the hubs of their communities by providing wraparound services and enrichment opportunities to students and families in need. If children lack eyeglasses, dental care, mental health counseling, school supplies, winter coats, sufficient food, or stable housing, a community school would connect students and families to…

Using secondary data from a NY Kids comparative case study conducted in 2017-2018 of two positive outlier high schools, the purpose of this dissertation was to learn more about their discipline practices and the role secondary school leaders play in shaping those discipline systems. Two positive outlier high schools were studied, as they were…

Although anyone can become a victim, commercial exploitation and human trafficking disproportionately affect women, girls, and communities of color within the United States. Despite its prevalence, misinformation and a widespread lack of understanding on this issue create barriers to identifying and supporting trafficking victims. School staff are…

Schools are increasingly being leveraged as intervention points to address childhood trauma due to the well-established links between childhood trauma exposure and poor child well-being outcomes. However, although preschool-aged children experience higher rates of trauma, such as maltreatment and violence exposure, than their older counterparts,…

Catholic educational institutions play an important role in educating Latino high achieving students. Latino students attending Catholic high schools are more likely to graduate and transition to college immediately following high school. Few studies have examined the outcomes of Latino students who attend Catholic colleges and universities and…

For more than a decade, the Foundation for Child Development, through the Young Scholars Program (YSP), funded studies about the early education, health, and well-being of children from low-income, immigrant families. Through YSP, the Foundation aimed to fill a gap in policy and practice-relevant research on young immigrant children. It invested…

For several years, WestEd's Measure to Learn and Improve (MLI) project team has kept California state policy leaders informed about the statewide implementation of the California Academic Standards in English language arts and mathematics, by summarizing and disseminating results from the RAND Corporation's annual American Educator Panel (AEP)…

With increasing diversity and multiculturalism, there is a greater need to understand ways to foster positive intergroup interactions. In this study, youth ages 14 to 18 from three different regions in the United States (N = 21) were given camera phones and instructed to take pictures of what multiculturalism meant to them and how it played a role…

American educators are expected to be partners in the rearing of our children, with crucial roles in children's intellectual and moral development both. We therefore must find thoughtfully balanced ways of assessing school performance and engineering school reform. In this essay, a high school principal reflects on recent accountability reforms in…

Drawing from critical theories in education, this article empirically examines the role that public schools can play as conduits for critical peace education, particularly for young people who have been historically marginalized from school. Based on two years of ethnographic data collection at a public high school in New York City, I explore how…

In recent years, some states in the United States have enacted policies that grant some higher education benefits--primarily in-state resident tuition eligibility--to certain undocumented students. While in existence since 2001, little is known of the role of high school institutional agents in implementing such policies. This study describes the…

This article describes a cultural production process called religification, in which religious affiliation, rather than race or ethnicity, has become the core category of identity for working-class Pakistani-American youth in the United States. In this dialectical process, triggered by political changes following the September 11 terrorist…

The New York State Physical Education Learning Standards for K-12 students were transformed into a survey administered to a sample of teachers of physical education (N = 261), ascertaining their ratings of their knowledge, ability/skill, education/training, and attitudes on the importance of future professionals receiving training to teach…

Only a quarter of the class of 2008 graduated from Alain Locke Senior High School in Los Angeles after four years. This was unsurprising since nearly 60 percent of the class had left Locke by the end of their sophomore year. A majority of Locke teachers--frustrated with the school's mediocrity--petitioned to allow charter management organization…

Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic research in three New York City small high schools, this study examines the role of the school in managing school choice and asks what social processes are associated with principals' disparate approaches. Although district policy did not allow principals to select students based on their performance,…