Background/Context: The United States is currently undergoing a period of unprecedented immigration, with the majority of new arrivals coming from Asia and Latin America, not Europe. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (APIs) represent the fastest growing racial group in the United States, and schools are again being asked to socialize newcomer…

In this article, we analyzed past and present research studies in which investigators examined differences in academic achievement between students who were White and non-White (i.e., specifically Hispanic or students designated as Limited English Proficient). As anticipated, the majority of the researchers whose studies were analyzed reported…

Lawmakers have made the closing of racial and ethnic academic achievement gaps an acknowledged priority of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. So far the research has largely explored common factors explaining why Black and Latino students generally lag behind Whites and Asian Americans. Lorretta Chavez, a public school teacher and a doctoral…

STEM education was a systematic teaching and/or learning process in the STEM fields and a positive correlation existed between STEM education, and the economic prosperity and power of a nation in the globalized world. In recent years, rising concerns have emerged about American STEM education. Many stakeholders wondered that whether the nation has…

Beginning with an overview of historical commitments by AAPI populations to educational advocacy, this article analyzes the current US educational policy context of No Child Left Behind at the national and local level, and argues that both its rhetoric and system of "accountability" have been crafted in ways that are completely…

In this study, the authors examined the school experiences of middle-class African American parents and students, because they are largely overlooked in the professional literature when it comes to underachievement and parent involvement. Although No Child Left Behind (NCLB) highlights parent involvement and school accountability through the use…

In 1996, the National Research Council (NRC) published the "National Science Education Standards." Similarly in 2000, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) published the "Principles and Standards for School Mathematics." These standards provided the nation with a framework for conceptualizing what and how…

Language and cultural preservation efforts among different communities of language speakers in the United States have received increasing attention as interest in linguistic rights and globalization continues to deepen. In addition to mounting evidence of the cognitive, psychological, and academic benefits of heritage language/community language…

In most contemporary discussions about the achievement gap--between rich and poor students, and between Asian and white students on the one hand, and African American and Hispanic students on the other--the underlying assumption is that educational reform can eliminate it. Educational reform efforts, focused on testing and data-driven…

The suspension of any student is problematic for students from all groups. Suspension and expulsion as interventions are inadequate to change behavior unless they are paired with teaching replacement behaviors. However, African American/Black, American Indian and Hispanic students are suspended and expelled at rates that are disproportionate to…

The "No Child Left Behind Act" establishes federal education policy for the United States, with a heavy focus on accountability through high-stakes testing. Provisions specific to English language learners (ELLs) include the mandate for their inclusion in state math tests, even for newcomer students enrolled for less than one year. Most…

Based on a qualitative study of an urban middle school, this article examines student perceptions of shifting tracking structures following the dismantling of a school's bilingual education program. The article demonstrates that students understood the school changes based on supposed language needs through an explicitly racialized lens, thereby…

No Child Left Behind's mandated high-stakes testing and accountability policies have pervaded districts and schools nationwide. To examine student progress and graduation in the midst of first generation Texas-style accountability, this study tracked individuals in a longitudinal dataset of over 45,000 high school students in the Houston…

Most studies of school achievement use free-lunch eligibility or other basic indicators to adjust for differences in students' socioeconomic backgrounds. This study determines whether these variables are enough to separate the confounding effects of students' backgrounds from the main variables of interest in education studies. The Early Childhood…

Defining equity within the context of a diverse, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural society, and one where social class strongly influences one's life chances is problematic. This chapter reexamines equity in an attempt to advance the discourse beyond the debate about strategies to close the achievement gap between White…