The Catalyst Scholarship Program at Hunter College of The City University of New York (CUNY) was established with a four-year award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund scholarships to 40 academically talented but financially disadvantaged students majoring in four disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics…

Background: Moderate weight loss and physical activity (PA) can prevent or delay type 2 diabetes however there is a need for innovative, effective programs to promote PA in high-risk individuals. Purpose: We examined the effect of a group-based adaption of the DPP lifestyle intervention implemented in partnership with the YMCA (YDPP) on changes in…

Through Job For the Future's (JFF's) work with communities around the country on the Back on Track model, postsecondary bridging strategies have emerged as a particularly critical and especially replicable component of programming for vulnerable youth. This issue brief offers a typology of evidence-informed bridge programming, drawing on…

Each edition of the IDRA Newsletter strives to provide many different perspectives on the issues in education topics discussed and to define its significance in the state and national dialogue. This issue focuses on Valuing & Asset-Based Solutions and includes: (1) Ensuring Equity and Nondiscrimination in Student Discipline Policy and Practice…

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), like No Child Left Behind before it, requires states to report information on the academic achievement of students in each of their schools, both overall and for various subgroups of students. A subgroup of particular interest to policymakers and researchers is economically disadvantaged students,…

This report provides information on enrollment in the Texas public school system from the 2005-06 through 2015-16 school years, based on data collected through the Texas Public Education Information Management System. Enrollment data are provided by grade, race/ethnicity, gender, and economically disadvantaged status, and for special populations…

At KIPP Comienza Community Prep--an elementary school in Huntington Park, California, where 94 percent of students qualify for free lunch, and more than 60 percent are English language learners--most kindergarteners start out well below pre-reading levels. In 2015, however, just a few years after these students walked in the school doors unable to…

Secondary schools have managed significant changes in the Key Stage 4 curriculum they offer in response to changes in performance tables and accountability measures from 2010 onwards. In this piece, the authors assess how these changes are starting to affect the educational choices and successes of pupils at the ages of 16 and 18. This is…

This dissertation illustrates how admission policies shape access to postsecondary education. Evidence comes from two sectors, each with a distinct type of admission system: highly selective institutions that practice holistic admission (chapters 2 and 3) and less selective public four-year colleges that use admission thresholds (chapter 4). The…

This paper begins by outlining the "education revolution" policy direction of the Australian federal government, and the ways in which it envisages meeting its goal of having a 40% of the population between 25 and 34 with a Bachelor's degree by 2025, and ensuring that 20% of tertiary students come form LSES backgrounds. This is…

Folk belief theory is suggested as a primary cause for the persistence of the achievement gap. In this research-supported theory, culturally specified folk beliefs about learning and teaching prompt educators to direct more rigorous curriculum to high-advantage students but not to low-advantage students, resulting in impoverished pedagogy in…

Aside from effects on nearby property values, research is sparse on how foreclosures may generate negative externalities. Employing a unique dataset that matches individual student records from Boston Public Schools--including test scores, demographics, home address moves, and school changes--with real estate records indicating whether the student…

This critical ethnographic study investigated how gentrification processes shaped an elementary school's community and two-way bilingual education (TWBE) program in Central Texas. Findings revealed how these gentrification processes impacted the principal and vice principal at the ontological and epistemological levels, as their ways of being and…

A Grade 4 English language teacher in a township school in Cape Town, South Africa, in her quest to equip learners with new target language resources, is not held back by the perceived boundaries dividing named languages. Instead she employs language in creative and goal-directed ways that we believe have not received enough focused linguistic…

In Australia, like many western countries, there has been a convergence of education policy around a set of utilitarian and economistic approaches to vocational education and training in schools. Such approaches are based on the assumption that there is a direct relationship between national economic growth, productivity and human capital…