Nationally and in Indiana, the cultural mismatch can be seen in special education programs where minority students are overrepresented and most special educators are white (Arnold, 2003; Artiles et.al, 2005; Gaviria-Soto & Castro-Morera, 2005). Teachers in general and special education teachers in particular need to be culturally competent.…

As the governing board is calling for increased persistence and graduation rates, Peaks University (a pseudonym) in the southwestern United States will need to incorporate strategies to improve the perseverance to graduation of specific student groups including African American males. In a state where "Hispanics constitute 25 percent and…

A two-week summer program designed to promote interest and learning in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields is documented. The program included a week-long engineering emphasis. Students and teachers from ten rural and financially disadvantaged school districts participated in the program. Three middle school and…

Indigenous participation rates in higher education are significantly lower than the rates reported for non-Indigenous people in Australia--with the greatest disparity evident in the area of postgraduate studies. This problem needs to be addressed by providing culturally appropriate support mechanisms to Indigenous postgraduate students. This…

Robinson, McKay, Katayama, and Fan ("Contemporary Educational Psychology," 23, 331-343, 1998) reported that women were underrepresented in terms of authorships, editorial board memberships, and editorships in the field of educational psychology based on membership trends. More recently, Evans, Hsieh, and Robinson ("Educational Psychology Review,"…

Despite U.S. higher education facing a wave of retirements by older baby boomer and World War II-era born professors, there remain large pockets in the academic work force, such as life science faculties at research universities and humanities/social science faculties across all of academia, where tenure-track jobs are scarce and the market is…

This qualitative study used Black Feminist Thought as the interpretive lens to investigate the perceptions and experiences of African American female doctoral students at predominately White institutions. Semi-structured interviews were used to gain an understanding of their experiences and the influences these experiences had on their academic…

Compared to other school typologies, major urban high poverty schools more frequently use exclusionary discipline and apply these techniques disproportionately to African American students. We explored school demographic variables predicting these two outcomes using data from 440 major urban, high poverty schools. Results suggest a different set…

There are many approaches to solving the problem of underrepresentation of some racial and ethnic groups and women in scientific and technical disciplines. Here, the authors evaluate the association of a summer bridge program with the graduation rate of underrepresented minority (URM) students at a selective technical university. They demonstrate…

The level of development of higher education (HE) is an important indicator to measure the development of the social economy and the civilization of a region or country. In this article, we compare the distribution of the freshmen of ethnic minorities (EMs) with the distribution of EMs over the population, based on a sample of 1 464 freshmen from…

Federal legislation allows local education agencies to use a student's response to scientific research-based interventions as a method of identifying specific learning disabilities. As a result, educational leadership is challenged to implement response to intervention (RTI). Despite increased literature addressing RTI, no consensus on…

Policymakers aiming to close the well-documented achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students have increasingly turned their attention to issues of teacher quality. A number of studies have demonstrated that teachers are inequitably distributed across student subgroups by input measures like experience and qualifications, as well…

This hearing is the third in a series examining critical issues in postsecondary education as the committee looks to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. The topic discussed is of paramount importance and is arguably the bedrock of Federal higher education policy, that is, the Federal financial aid programs and their effectiveness in providing…

More than 2.3 million low-income young adults began postsecondary education in 2008. Where these students initially enroll is of greater consequence than it is to their economically better-off peers because the likelihood of completing college for students from low-income backgrounds depends strongly on where they start their studies. This brief…

For many young people, early college high schools are opening the door to higher education and better-paying careers. The 230 early college schools serve more than 50,000 students in 28 states, targeting groups that are underrepresented in higher education. These students and the schools they attend are refuting the conventional wisdom that such…