It has long been recognized that Black and Latinx students are underrepresented at America's top public universities and thus deprived of access to the institutions with the best graduation rates and career outcomes. Much less understood is whether these students at least have equitable access to their local community colleges, which are supposed…

The share of women achieving tertiary education has increased rapidly over time and now exceeds that of men in most OECD countries. However, women are severely under-represented in maths-intensive science fields, which are generally referred to as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths). The under-representation of women in these…

Utah's public technical colleges offer vocational certificate programs at a low cost to students, as required by statute. Certificates are accredited by the Council on Occupational Education and provide students with competencies necessary for entry into gainful employment. The ability of students to attain marketable skills at a low cost and in a…

Decades of research show that fully certified and experienced teachers matter for student achievement. Yet, providing all students with equitable access to such teachers has long been a struggle in U.S. schools. This report analyzes data from the U.S. Department of Education's two most recent years of the biannual Civil Rights Data Collection…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to examine the extent to which differences were present by student demographic characteristic in the reading achievement of Texas Grade 3 students. In the first article, the extent to which the economic status (i.e., Poor, Not Poor) of Grade 3 underrepresented boys in Texas is related to…

Within the past decade, there has been a growing number of studies examining undermatch--when students apply to or enroll in institutions less selective than their academic qualifications permit. To estimate undermatch, researchers must define institutions' selectivity levels and determine which students are eligible to gain admission to these…

African American children are disproportionally overrepresented in the U.S. child protection system. Because educational personnel are a significant source of reports of suspected child maltreatment across the country and in all states, the present study examines the impact of these reports on racial disproportionality and disparity at the…

Although the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) recognizes the importance of school counselors, there is limited guidance about the expectations and roles of school counselors in serving the diverse needs of students in IB schools. With the IBO's movement toward a mission of "IB for All" to address equitable access to…

This article proposes that in addition to training teams of students to succeed in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling, the contest and the preparation for competition can be successfully used as a framework to teach an auxiliary skill set to undergraduate STEM majors through workshop-style modules. The skills emphasized are collaboration across…

Despite being originally designed to educate men, honors programs are not very attractive to male students in general and to male students of color in particular. Because access to honors programs is limited by a credentialing process that favors white men, many members of minority groups find them inhospitable and are significantly…

A number of studies have shown that health literacy is an important factor in a variety of health status indicators and outcomes. Low health literacy differentially affects minorities and older adults, but can be addressed through effective educational interventions. Even when provided in groups, however, these interventions can reach only a small…

Early in the semester, during a seemingly benign math lesson over money, one of the students in my second and third grade blended classroom halted the instruction to ask "Wait! Why are there no women on money? Is there any money with women on it?" Never one to miss an opportunity to get my students thinking critically, we took some time…

We are examining the impact of a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) at a land-grant, Hispanic-serving institution in the southwestern United States. Students in our CURE completed one or two extended research projects over a single semester. Our CURE enrolled a high proportion of underrepresented minority students (70.3%),…

Students' intentions to persevere and their career choices in science, technology, engineering, and math fields can be impacted by their physics identities. Women are severely underrepresented at all levels in physics and engineering. Physics in particular has stereotypes about being a discipline for brilliant men. Therefore, it is particularly…

Schools differentially sort students into special education by race, though researchers debate the extent to which this is caused by racist school practices versus variation in student need due to other racial inequalities. I test the interaction between school-level racial composition and student-level race as a predictor of special education…