Scholarship on college choice largely focuses on how students search for colleges but less is known about how colleges recruit students. This article analyzes off-campus recruiting visits for 15 public research universities. We Web-scrape university admissions websites and issue public records requests to collect data on recruiting visits.…

Despite the ubiquity and complexity of grading, there is limited contemporary research on grading students in schools. There is, however, an outpouring of publications and consultants promoting new approaches. Many eliminate effort and behavior scores, remove the zero, adopt a four-point system, advocate rubrics, or promote their own software…

Publicly funded pre-K is often touted as a means to narrow achievement gaps, but this goal is less likely to be achieved if poor and/or minority children do not, at a minimum, attend equal quality pre-K as their non-poor, non-minority peers. In this paper, I find large "quality gaps" in public pre-K between poor, minority students and…

In this article, we present findings from a three-year comparative longitudinal and ethnographic study of how schools in two cities, Buffalo and Denver, have taken up STEM education reform, including the idea of "inclusive STEM-focused schools," to address weaknesses in urban high schools with majority low-income and minority students.…

Rendering visible African immigrants' shared and differing experiences of civic learning and action, the authors present findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews with second- and 1.5-generation African immigrants in New York City. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework of African immigrant identities constructions and civic engagement,…

Researchers and policymakers often assume that teacher turnover harms student achievement, though recent studies suggest this may not be the case. Using a unique identification strategy that employs school-by-grade level turnover and two classes of fixed-effects models, this study estimates the effects of teacher turnover on over 850,000 New York…

This article describes a cultural production process called religification, in which religious affiliation, rather than race or ethnicity, has become the core category of identity for working-class Pakistani-American youth in the United States. In this dialectical process, triggered by political changes following the September 11 terrorist…

For well over a decade school districts across the United States have struggled to recruit and retain effective mathematics teachers. In response to the need for qualified math teachers and the difficulty of directly recruiting individuals who have already completed the math content required for qualification, some districts, including Baltimore,…

This article explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover…

If the notion of public and private spheres seems somehow quaint or old-fashioned, the distinction between public and private corporations will be that much more obscure. Yet Channel One broadcasts in a public school classroom are indisputably the result of a contract between a private corporation (Alloy Media + Marketing) and a public corporation…

A randomized-trials design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a preschool mathematics program based on a comprehensive model of research-based curricula development. Thirty-six preschool classrooms were assigned to experimental (Building Blocks), comparison (a different preschool mathematics curriculum), or control conditions. Children were…

This study examines 11 interdisciplinary teams involving 30 teachers and 542 students in New York and California. The teams represented an array of approaches to interdisciplinary curricula, ranging from simple correlation to major reconstrual of the contributing disciplines. Teams that engaged in the most reconstrual of traditional content also…

Examined the links between the minority and poverty status of public secondary schools and course-taking patterns within those schools by looking at the 1984 Regents Action Plan in New York state to explore the role of standards-based policies in altering connections between schooling context and curricula. Finds show the beneficial effects of the…

This study examines the relationships between student literacy performance and discussion-based approaches to the development of understanding in 64 middle and high school English classrooms. A series of hierarchical linear models indicated that discussion-based approaches were significantly related to spring performance, controlling for fall…