This article features artist Amalia Mesa-Baines and discusses her background and influences, her creative style, and her cultural connection. Mesa-Baines is the director of Visual and Public Art at California State University, Monterey Bay. She is an independent artist, a cultural critic, and an author of scholarly research. She is also a McArthur…

Recent reform efforts in the child welfare system have called for child welfare agencies to provide community-based services and to increase the involvement of external stakeholders in identifying and developing services within the community. At the same time, child welfare agencies are faced with the challenge of providing services to an…

Although educational researchers are moving beyond purely psychological and cognitive models of learning to consider the ways in which mathematics teaching might reach a more diverse student population, this work remains in its infancy, and the concept of "knowledge" is rarely questioned. This paper begins with the idea that mathematics…

The purposes of this qualitative narrative study were to explore the potential areas of conflict Latina college students experience between their educational goals and traditional cultural gender roles and expectations. Participants were selected utilizing purposeful sampling methods. All participants were first-generation college students.…

School counselors can serve as agents of change in our nation's schools, particularly for marginalized students whose voices are frequently not heard. Historically, the role of the school counselor has been under-utilized and inaccurately defined. Research available on counselor role definition has been primarily quantitative. Research on…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act emphasized the importance of parents' participation in all educational decisions concerning their children with disabilities. However, parents' ability to actively participate in, and contribute to, their children's special education process is influenced by a variety of parent and…

Purpose: The purpose of this causal-comparative quantitative study was to examine the effect of Texas' Closing the Gaps by 2015 college readiness plan on graduation and persistence rates in community colleges. Specifically examined in this study were the graduation and persistence rates and the 4-year and 6-year graduation rates of Texas community…

Present research has shown that parental involvement has a large effect on student achievement. The current study utilized both casual-comparative and correlation methodology and identified variables that influence parental involvement. A review of literature with respect to parental involvement was presented. The study utilized survey data from…

Two overlapping issues have given rise to this study: the need for assessment instruments to use with Spanish-speaking Latinos and the need for normative data on current and future Spanish-language instruments. Numerous career assessment instruments exist for the English-speaking population. These instruments may be administered on computer-based…

We investigate possible explanations for the large decline in U.S. teen childbearing that occurred in the twenty years following the 1991 peak. Our review of previous evidence and the results of new analyses presented here leads to the following main set of observations. First, the observed decline in teen childbearing is even more surprising…

During a period when the school-age language-minority population grew, from 8.8 million in 1999 to 10.8 million in 2007 (U.S. Department of Education 2010, indicator 5), the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) tracked the educational experiences of a nationally representative sample of children who were in…

The study reviewed in this report examined the impact of the "Pathway Project" intervention on students who were mainstreamed Latino English language learners (ELLs). One hundred and three English teachers in 15 schools in California were recruited and randomly assigned to either the "Pathway Project" condition or a comparison…

The South remains the most desegregated region in the country for black students, but along every measure of segregation and at each level of geography, gains made during the desegregation era are slipping away at a steady pace. This report shows that the segregation of Southern black students has been progressively increasing since judicial…

This dissertation is based on a year and a half multi-institutional study of seven Mexican American students transitioning from high school to a community college or a university. It explores the differences between high school, community college, and university literacy environments, focusing on the following: the impact of standardized testing…

This dissertation interrogates the experiences of Asian American and Latino law students, as racialized second-generation, children of immigrants entering an elite profession. Intersecting immigration, race and ethnicity, and professional socialization literature, I compare the students' experiences across race, gender, socioeconomic…