Educators remove over 3.45 million students from school annually for disciplinary reasons, despite strong evidence that school suspension policies are harmful to students. The research presented in this volume demonstrates that disciplinary policies and practices that schools control directly exacerbate today's profound inequities in educational…

It has been well documented--including in recent reports from Washington State (Professional Educator Standards Board, 2014) and several large districts across the country (Albert Shanker Institute, 2015)--that the public teaching workforce is far less racially and ethnically diverse than the student body in U.S. public schools. Washington State,…

This study tested to determine if a relationship existed between excused versus unexcused absences on STAAR reading and math scale scores for Hispanic, economically disadvantaged third through fifth grade elementary students in a rural South Texas school district. Research questions included: 1) Is there a relationship between excused absences and…

The current canons of education are replete with suggestions for how to raise the achievement of Hispanic and Latino students. Absent from that discussion is what to teach them in a way that anchors them to their uniquely American culture and history. The author considers how Mexican-American history is often taught as if it were an offshoot of…

Mary Amanda Stewart is conferred the 2013 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for her enterprising and timely work in the field of education research. Stewart's dissertation highlights the ways in which Latino and Latina immigrant youth who are newly arrived to the U.S. possess many skills, including managing transnational relationships…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether typically developing preschool children with bilingual experience show evidence of learning within brief dynamic assessment language tasks administered in a graduated prompting framework. Dynamic assessment has shown promise for accurate identification of language impairment in bilingual…

This study contributed to the school readiness literature by taking an intrachild perspective that examined the relations between Latino/a children's school readiness profiles and later academic achievement. Teachers rated the school readiness of 781 Latino/a kindergartners during the first month of school using the Kindergarten Student Entrance…

Classroom based service-learning is an effective tool toward positive student outcomes. Still, there is a need for service-learning components to be more deeply integrated with college curricula as a whole. The current study explores the effects of creating a service-learning component in the Social Psychology classroom based upon applying the…

Truancy issues are longstanding and the desires to develop programs that are effective have been just as enduring. More striking is the lack of evidence of a truancy program evaluation process that includes collaboration with the clients that it serves. Truancy intervention programs have a wide range of effects on participants from multiple ethnic…

The graduation rates for Hispanic students in higher education are the lowest in the nation in comparison to any other subgroups, yet they are the fastest growing population in the nation. Lack of a rigorous curriculum in a K-12 setting and college readiness skills are factors. There needs to be a strong partnership among K-12 school districts and…

A popular social discourse in the United States is that play is important for children's learning and that parental involvement maximizes play's learning potential. Past research has concluded that parents who hold this view of play are more likely to play with their children than those who do not. This study investigated the prevalence…

Based on a qualitative study documenting how Spanish teachers bear an especially heavy burden as unofficial translators, interpreters, and school representatives, this article documents how some Latina high school Spanish teachers struggle to form social networks with Latino students in new Latino school communities. Employing social frameworks,…

Recent studies show that many college instructors still believe that Latino students lack the "school smarts" for academic success. This essay challenges the notion of school smarts in order to highlight Latino students' numerous strengths. I share my model for a mentorship program that facilitates better student-faculty…

This chapter introduces effective strategies and practices for working with secondary and postsecondary schools to advance rural Latinas into engineering and other STEM-related fields.

The association of more crime with youthful age is widely accepted in social science. However, a literature search revealed no studies of the age-crime relationship that controlled for young ages' economic disadvantage. This research gap is addressed using the California Criminal Justice Statistics Center's arrest detail and Census poverty…