This chapter provides an overview of undergraduate STEM initiatives for underrepresented minorities and women, as well as a description and critical analysis of one comprehensive federally funded initiative at a research-intensive university.

In this article the author starts from the premise that, although there were no renowned Indian poets at Carlisle and other Indian boarding schools in the United States, students in federal boarding schools read and wrote poetry. She argues that the rhetorically bold Carlisle poems--along with the letters and articles published in the Carlisle…

In 1965, President Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act, giving birth to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. The act declared, "Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts…

In designing multiple-measure evaluation systems for teachers and principals, one of the key questions to emerge is: how to obtain student growth data for teachers of academic subjects and grades not covered by statewide assessments. Race to the Top grantees that began early to implement new evaluation systems are well on their way to…

Federal funding for early childhood education and care promotes three overarching policy goals: (1) increasing children's access to services; (2) raising the quality of early childhood programs; and (3) fostering greater coordination among the many providers--public schools, center-based child care, home-based child care, Head Start, and more--of…

Indiana English learners (ELs) constitute a rapidly growing portion of the state's school-aged population, and those classified as limited English proficient are low performers on the state test. The purpose of this embedded mixed methods study was to understand how school personnel respond to accountability mandates, interpret test scores, and…

Caught between extraordinary public expectations and relatively modest constitutional authority, U.S. presidents historically have fashioned all sorts of mechanisms--executive orders, proclamations, memoranda--by which to move their objectives forward. William Howell asserts that under President Barack Obama's administration, presidential…

Researchers have become increasingly interested in programs' main and interaction effects of two variables (A and B, e.g., two treatment variables or one treatment variable and one moderator) on outcomes. A challenge for estimating main and interaction effects is to eliminate selection bias across A-by-B groups. I introduce Rubin's causal model to…

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased accountability pressure in U.S. public schools by threatening to impose sanctions on Title 1 schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in consecutive years. Difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of failing AYP in the first year of NCLB on teacher effort in the…

During the Great Depression, following the stock market crash of 1929, the nation's greatest financial crisis, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration created the Public Works of Art Project. It was the first federal government program designed to support the arts by putting artists back to work. The program's purpose was to alleviate…

Research Findings: This study provides the first independent investigation of the second most widely used multidimensional assessment in Head Start--the Preschool Child Observation Record, Second Edition (COR-2). We conducted a comprehensive investigation into the validity of the COR-2 using data from all children in an urban school district's…

This study considered the facilitators and barriers of successful inclusion in Head Start classrooms by examining the perspectives and practices of instructional professionals. A cross-sectional survey design was combined with direct observation in inclusive Head Start classrooms. Survey data were collected from 71 Head Start instructional…

More than 40 states plan to assess student performance with new tests tied to the Common Core State Standards. In summer 2013, results from Common Core-aligned tests in New York showed a steep decline in outcomes. Common Core advocates hailed the scores as an honest accounting of school and student performance, while others worried that they…

Calls for universal preschool programs have become commonplace, reinforced by President Obama's call for "high-quality preschool for all" in 2013. Any program that could cost state and federal taxpayers $50 billion per year warrants a closer look at the evidence on its effectiveness. This report reviews the major evaluations of preschool…

Section 104(a) of the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act (HHFKA) of 2010 made the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) available to Local Educational Agencies (LEAs) and schools in high poverty areas. Under the CEP, families are not required to submit applications for free or reducedprice (FRP) meals, and schools must provide free lunch and breakfast…