For educators committed to promoting social equity, the question of how to address dialect hegemony is increasingly important. While linguists have long accepted the concept of dialect equality, educators have struggled with the issue, sparking a history of controversy and debate underscoring larger social issues of diversity and equity. For…

Beginning with the 2015-2016 school year, the West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) partnered with the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) and Marshall University to conduct a five-year study of the quality of the West Virginia Universal Pre-K (WV Pre-K) program. The study was designed to examine the effectiveness of the…

The commentaries on Downey and Condron found in this issue help advance an overdue conversation about schools and inequality. This paper considers two questions that are prompted by the comments from the authors' colleagues: (1) Would we make more progress reducing socio-economic and racial achievement gaps by reforming schools or by reforming the…

Community colleges were founded on the principles of social justice. This foundation still permeates the mission and core values of community colleges across the country. Certainly one of the most unique and compelling social-justice elements of community colleges has been the emphasis on open access to higher education. This open-door philosophy…

In this brief, authors Kent Scovill and Corinna Jenkins Tucker describe Coös youths' mentor relationships using data from the Carsey Institute's Coös Youth Study collected in 2007. They report that, in 2007, a majority of Coös youth in seventh and eleventh grade (60.2 percent) report having a mentor. In addition, 68 percent of Coös youths' mentors…

Since 1973, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about student achievement in mathematics. Results of these periodic assessments, produced in print and web-based formats, provide valuable information to a wide variety of audiences. They inform citizens about the nature of students' comprehension of the…

In 1994, America took a giant step backward in understanding intelligence and how it can be cultivated. Richard Herrnstein, a psychology professor at Harvard University, and Charles Murray, a political scientist with the American Enterprise Institute, published "The Bell Curve," a best-selling book that was controversial among…

In recent years, the transition from higher education to work in comparative perspective has attracted increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. Previous studies reveal similarities and differences in labour market outcomes across countries, but explanatory frameworks mainly refer to fields of study, whereas differences by types…

Elite boarding schools endeavor to instill in their students elite-class solidarity, strong beliefs in both meritocracy and the essential rightness of the status quo, and practical political know-how. Each of these objectives is wholly compatible with the self-interest of their students and their families. In the vast majority of working-class…

A lot of children are suffering--from bullet wounds, car crashes, gashes in legs, and great tears in the social fabric. There are wounds to heal, hopes to foster, and scar tissue to form. Public school teachers and leaders, wherever we are, this is our work. And we can do a good job of it, if the school community is strong, and if we always work…

The place of popular and multifunctional media in the musical life of young people has been addressed in several studies. Music can aid in understanding youth cultures through the identification of musical preferences: inform about new lifestyles, fashions, ways of acting, work as motivation for personal dreams and aspirations, and build…

Across and within democratic societies, youth experiences of education for citizenship vary widely. A growing body of research suggests that students' experiences of democratic citizenship education will differ according to how academic programmes, community culture, socio-economic status and gender intersect with prevailing conceptions of…

The purpose of this study was to answer the following research questions: (1) Do secondary social studies pre-service teachers incorporate literacy strategies in their work samples during student teaching? (2) To what extent and under what conditions do secondary social studies pre-service teachers use higher levels of literacy strategies in their…

This methodological brief introduces the readers to the propensity score matching method, which can be used for enhancing the validity of causal inferences in research situations involving nonexperimental design or observational research, or in situations where the benefits of an experimental design are not fully realized because of reasons beyond…

In most PISA-participating countries and economies, the average socio-economic background of students who attend privately managed schools is more advantaged than that of those who attend public schools. Yet in some countries, there is little difference in the socio-economic profiles between public and private schools. Why? An analysis of PISA…