In 2023, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools elevated the voices of charter school students, educators, families, and advocates. The organization persevered through challenges and expanded access to high quality public charter schools for a greater number of students around the nation. This annual report covers what the sector…

After decades of advancement in education equality, a disproportional number of racially minoritized students are placed in special education. Addressing the disproportionality is a complicated issue due to various contributing factors. One possible cause is racial bias from teachers who rate problem behaviors of African American boys for special…

Local teacher recruitment through "grow-your-own" programs is a prominent strategy to address workforce shortages and ensure that incoming teachers resemble, understand, and have strong connections to their communities. We exploit the staggered rollout of the Teacher Academy of Maryland career and technical education certificate program…

State policymakers in the United States have in recent years experimented with new initiatives to change the procedures used by public institutions to assess and assign academically underprepared students to non-credit developmental education (or remedial) courses. This study explores whether the most recent developmental education reform in…

This memorandum provides information pertinent to the participation and performance of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examinations for 2023 graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). In 2023, 59.3% of MCPS graduates took one or more AP exams; 17.3 percentage points more than graduates in Maryland and 24.6…

Research on cognitive bias explains how our brains are prone to stumble, overlooking key points of data. This article discusses how this phenomenon can help us understand why we often stumble in assessing the state of campus race relations, overlooking ways that White students self-segregate. In contrast, students of color have high rates of…

Racial disparities in school discipline remain central to policy discussions around school discipline. Recent research points to the importance of how discipline disparities are measured for the conclusions that are drawn about the extent of the problem or whether such disparities are improving. This brief uses data from Maryland to demonstrate…

This memorandum provides information pertinent to the participation and performance of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examinations for 2022 graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). In 2022, 63.2% of MCPS graduates took one or more AP exams--21.9 percentage points more than public school graduates in…

This memorandum provides information pertinent to the participation and performance of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examinations for 2021 graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). In 2021, 66.6 percent of MCPS graduates took one or more AP exams, a rate that was 23.0 and 31.7 percentage points higher…

This memorandum provides information pertinent to the participation and performance of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examinations for 2020 graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). In 2020, 66.6 percent of MCPS graduates took one or more AP exams, a rate that was 20.8 and 28.3 percentage points higher…

Promise programs are proliferating across the United States, with wide variation in their design. Using national data on 33 Promise programs affecting single, 2-year colleges, this study examines program effects on first-time, full-time college enrollments of students by race/ethnicity and gender classification. Results suggest Promise programs…

As U.S. suburbs become more racially and ethnically diverse, they have the opportunity to make their schools similarly diverse. But integration is not assured, even in districts with significant demographic diversity. Iris Rotberg draws on Montgomery County Public Schools, a suburban Maryland district, to illustrate the opportunities and risks…

Background: Little research exists on suspension of students with autism or intellectual disabilities. We examined suspension rates of students with autism or intellectual disability in Maryland from 2004 to 2015 to understand whether race and disability status predicted the odds of being suspended. Method: We used school enrollment data and…

Objective: Racial discrimination experiences are common among youth with an ethnic minority background, and such experiences affect health. Stress-sensitive systems like the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis have been proposed as one mechanism. HPA-axis activity, measured through daily patterns of salivary cortisol, is altered among…

This study investigated children's and adolescents' predictions of inclusion and evaluations of exclusion in interracial and same-race peer contexts. The sample (N = 246) consisted of African American (n = 115) and European American (n = 131) children and adolescents who judged the likelihood of including a new peer, evaluated the group's decision…