We study how geographic access to public postsecondary institutions is associated with students' college enrollment decisions across race and socioeconomic status. Leveraging rich administrative data, we first document substantial differences in students' local college options, with White, Hispanic, and rural students having, on average, many…

The purpose of the study is to examine the parents' perceptions of STEM-oriented public schools. The significance of study is to investigate whether any correlations were present among parental perception and ethnicity, linguistic, and income and educational background of parents. The parents from 13 different STEM-oriented schools in Texas state…

This study tracked college and workforce outcomes for students who began 8th grade in fall 1998 and attended a Texas public school. Students were tracked for 17 years, through summer 2015, when they were approximately 30 years old. Of the 38,322 eighth-grade students in Harris County, 30 percent finished a postsecondary certificate or degree.…

Although the percentage of high school students in advanced STEM courses has risen steadily in the past two decades throughout the United States, disparities persist across student subgroups, such as racial/ethnic groups (Aud et al., 2013; Laird, Alt, & Wu, 2009; Texas Education Agency, 2011). Racial/ethnic minority student enrollment in…

Inclusive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) high schools (ISHSs), which combine nonselective admission policies with a STEM-emphasized curriculum and college-going culture, represent an emerging STEM-focused school model that has been rapidly expanding across the country. In 2006, Texas launched the Texas STEM (T-STEM)…

This article analyzes the effectiveness of an activity we developed to help students better understand intersectionality. Intersectionality is an analytic concept that signifies ways that inequalities may overlap to create unique forms of privilege and subjugation. In the activity, students use assigned vignettes from the perspective of research…

This article describes the implementation process of a top-down dual-language bilingual education (DLBE) program in a large urban district, specifically examining the development of one-way (OW) and two-way (TW) DLBE programs. We explored how teachers made sense of, interpreted, and executed the educational language policy with these two distinct…

We critically examined the odds of earning a college preparatory diploma for African American high school seniors receiving special education services under Texas's Top 10% Policy (TTPP). Critical policy analysis was used to explore the meritocratic guise of college access for African American youth with disabilities, and through DisCrit,…

The two studies presented in this report were designed to test the effectiveness of a new diagnostic-based reading intervention for classroom teachers, called the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI). This TRI Tier 2 intervention stressed diagnostic teaching as the key to helping struggling readers make rapid progress in reading in the regular…

In order to determine whether poverty is the result of the work orientation of the poor, a secondary analysis of data obtained from a stratified sample of the Houston population was conducted, controlling for age, sex, and ethnicity: the findings are interpreted as casting doubt on the "culture of overty" hypothesis as it relates to work…

The military orientations of rural East Texas black and white high school students interviewed in 1966 were very similar; those of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan youth also did not differ much. Since then, status projections of Texas youth have been extended by adding a sample of Mexican American sophomores (1966) to compare with the East Texas…

The specific objective was to study racial differences in the consistency dimension of desired status objects (aspirational frame of reference) and expected objects (anticipated frame of reference) of adolescent males from the rural South. Specific observations were made on (1) racial differences in consistency of aspirational frames of reference…