Background: Traditionally, SREE has traditionally focused on examining the effects of educational interventions with rigorous causal analysis. However, studies of racial/ethnic inequities in education do not always lend themselves to experimental or even quasi-experimental designs. Further, well formulated descriptive studies can provide crucial…

Background: School meals have demonstrated positive effects on dietary habits of children and adolescents, yet opportunities to increase participation exist. Little is known about how participation differs by race/ethnicity or by acculturation levels, thus this study aims to identify acculturation and race/ethnicity on school meal participation of…

Schools implementing Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) with fidelity demonstrate a wealth of student and school benefits. At the same time, there exists limited research from an inclusive innovation perspective: examining whether schools and communities have equitable access to PBIS based on sociodemographic school and…

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the School Breakfast Program (SBP) provide federal funding for school lunches and breakfasts served to nearly 30 million children daily in close to 94,000 schools. Because federal spending on NSLP and SBP depends in part on student participation in school meals, it may be of interest to Congress to…

Objective/Research Question: Community college "Promise" programs have proliferated recently, particularly in areas with many low-income, academically struggling students. Many Promise programs restrict eligibility by high school performance but set eligibility thresholds quite low. As such they function as "low-bar" merit…

Background: This study examines the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic on academic and career concerns of high school students; relationship between attendance and grades with educational concerns; and association between student perception of the pandemic and decision to attend school virtually or in-person. Methods: Diverse students in grades…

To assess education progress in the early grades and identify achievement gaps, this study examined reading achievement data for kindergarten and grade 1 students in two districts in Illinois: District U-46 (Elgin Area Schools) and District 186 (Springfield Public Schools). Drawing on a different reading assessment in each district, the study team…

This paper examines whether schoolwide free meals affect disciplinary outcomes, focusing on the use of suspensions. Under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), schools serving sufficiently high-poverty populations may enroll their entire student bodies in free lunch and breakfast programs, extending free meals to some students who would not…

This study employs hierarchal linear modeling to examine whether high school grade inflation occurred between 2010 and 2021, including for students who were tested during the pandemic. The study does so while simultaneously accounting for student and school characteristics. This is the first study, to the current authors' knowledge, that makes use…

The purpose of this study was to discover if food insecurity worsened in North American children during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study explored the prevalence of social food programs during remote learning periods when the pandemic halted in-person learning. Through progressive theoretical sampling, I investigated American and Canadian newspaper…

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program that allows schools serving low-income populations to classify all students as eligible for free meals, regardless of individual circumstances. This has implications for the use of free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data to proxy…

Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest partnered with the Arkansas Department of Education to examine Arkansas's middle school and high school indicators of postsecondary readiness and success, building on an earlier study of these indicators (Hester et al., 2021). Academic indicators include attaining proficiency on state academic…

Proportional identification of students for gifted services in Florida school districts is an important goal. A multi-level model was used to analyze school district data from the Florida Department of Education from the 2011-2016 academic years. Results from the study indicate that the likelihood of identification of students varied by their…

The research objective is to explain evidence of structural racism, inequity, and inadequacy in the Michigan public school finance system related to the education of Black students or Black descendants of captive and enslaved Africans. This analysis stems from ongoing research that integrates transformative paradigms, critical race theory, and…

Free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data are used ubiquitously to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP)--a recently-implemented policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program--allows schools serving low-income populations to identify all…