Research on the dearth of teachers of color has focused on disparities in college enrollment, completion, and academic major. The present study examines whether disparities may begin earlier. Analyses of nationally representative longitudinal data show that students of color are 2 to 4 percentage points less likely to hold teaching career…

New York City's Pre-K for All (PKA) is the nation's largest universal early childhood initiative, serving over 64,000 four-year-olds annually. Stemming from the program's choice architecture as well as the city's stark residential segregation, PKA programs are extremely segregated by child race/ethnicity. Our current study explores the complex…

Half of kindergarten teachers split children into higher and lower ability groups for reading or math. In national data, we predicted kindergarten ability group placement using linear and ordinal logistic regression with classroom fixed effects. In fall, test scores were the best predictors of group placement, but there was bias favoring girls,…

Latinx students now make up the largest share of charter school students nationally. In this article, I focus on Latinx charter school choosers in Houston, Texas, and ask what motivates Latinx parents to exit district schools. Drawing on interviews with 31 families, I find that perceptions of present and future risk motivate charter school choice.…

This cluster randomized controlled trial investigated the impact of project-based learning with professional development supports on social studies and literacy achievement and motivation of second-grade students from low-socioeconomic status school districts. At random in within-school pairs, 48 teachers were assigned to the experimental or…

This article documents the patterns of White-Black and White-Hispanic enrollment gaps in Advanced Placement (AP) and Dual Enrollment (DE) programs across thousands of school districts in the United States by merging several data sources. We show that the vast majority of districts have racial enrollment gaps in both programs, with wider gaps in AP…

Promise programs, or place-based tuition-free college policies, have become increasingly popular among policymakers looking to expand postsecondary attainment. In this article, we examine Tulsa Achieves, a widespread, albeit understudied type of promise program that covers the balance of students' tuition and fees after other aid is exhausted at a…

This study examines the association between college-bound friends and college enrollment using restricted transcript data from the High School Longitudinal Study. Propensity score matching and school fixed effects models suggest that having close college-bound friends is positively associated with enrolling in college. However, Black and Latino…

The rise in college preparatory coursework across American high schools appears not to affect college enrollment and graduation rates. This study uses the Civil Rights Data Collection to evaluate three stages along the college preparatory pipeline: access to, enrollment in, and mastery of Advanced Placement® and International Baccalaureate®…

Parental engagement is central to Head Start's two-generation mission. Drawing on research linking teacher-child racial/ethnic match to educational outcomes, the present study explores whether teacher-child match increases parental involvement in Head Start activities designed to support children and families. Using data from the 2006 and 2009…

Using a multimethod approach, we investigate whether gender gaps in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) major declaration in college are explained by differences in the grades that students earn in STEM versus non-STEM subjects. With quantitative data, we find that relative advantages in college academic performance in STEM…

This study examines the impact of a "natural experiment" that gave students the choice to place into or out of developmental math because of an unintended mistake made by a community college. During self-placement, more students chose to enroll in gateway college- and transfer-level math courses, however, greater proportions of female,…

This article explores how the associations between student achievement and achievement growth influence our understanding of the role schools play in academic inequality. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 (ECLS-K:2011), we constructed parallel growth and lagged score…

Despite widespread utilization, research exploring associations between playgroup and child development is scarce. We analyzed a national data set measuring the holistic development of children aged 4 to 6 years who commenced school in Australia in 2015 (n = 104,767), the Australian Early Development Census, to explore developmental differences…