Creating paths for the active engagement of Californians serves as a unifying theme for The James Irvine foundation as it pursues its mission of expanding opportunity for the people of California. Through the foundation's grantmaking programs in arts, California Democracy and Youth, it aspires to a California where opportunities to participate…

Alternative school settings for students who are identified as "disruptive or dangerous" are playing an increasingly prominent role in the world of public education, yet many gaps in the research literature are abound. This dissertation study is an effort to contribute to an understanding of the students placed in these alternative schools,…

This paper investigates reasons Indigenous Australian medical students gave for leaving their courses prior to graduation. Indigenous students who had withdrawn or deferred from their medical courses were asked about the barriers and disincentives that had dissuaded them from graduating. Although the response rate to the questionnaire was very…

This article provides an overview of objective and subjective class differences in experiences of postsecondary education. Using the metaphor of a funnel, it argues that cumulative disadvantage results when first-generation and low-income college students are disproportionately filtered out at each stage of the postsecondary education process.…

African American youth are characterized as experiencing declining academic motivation and engagement while simultaneously maintaining optimism for their future success. Thus, researchers hypothesize academic motivation to be a negative factor for educational aspirations when applied to an urban sample of African American middle school students (N…

This study captures the impact of school choice decisions by comparing the racial composition of the district schools students exited to the charter schools they entered. Charter school catchment areas are operationalized using a statewide student-level database to track school attendance patterns of individual students over 4 years. Charter…

This paper describes an innovative service delivery model to reduce the number of children entering the child welfare system. Point of Engagement (POE) is a collaborative family- and community-centered approach initiated in Compton, a regional office in Los Angeles County that serves south Los Angeles, a predominantly African American and…

Over the past few decades, community colleges have helped increase the representation of female and minority students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Flexible schedules, low tuition, proximity to jobs, and open access admissions make community colleges attractive to a diverse student body, especially…

Originally described by Leo Kanner (1943) and recognized as a special education eligibility category by the U.S. Department of Education in 1990 (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA], 1990), autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by deficits in reciprocal social interactions, communication, and interests and behaviors.…

The latest government data, analyzed recently by Howard Witt in an article in the "Chicago Tribune," shows that black students are getting a raw deal in American schools when it comes to discipline. In the average New Jersey public school, reports Witt, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled.…

Gender disproportionality in special education has been apparent for many years, reflected in male-to-female ratios that range from about 1.5:1 to 3.5:1. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent of disproportionate representation for the disability conditions of learning disability (LD), serious emotional disturbance (SED), and…

In many western countries attention is currently being given to the participation of students in tertiary Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. This is a result of internationally competing economic ambitions, coupled with acute shortages on the STEM labour market, a declining interest among students for STEM education…

This article addresses the stubborn and persistent underrepresentation of African American and Chicano-Latino in California higher education by examining the academic resources, performance, and postsecondary outcomes of students from public high schools with different racial compositions. The results from this study provide evidence for the…

According to recent data, only 3 percent of all college and university presidents are women of color. While the numbers remain disturbingly low, some of these women of color are making history as the "first" of their gender, race, and ethnicity to become president of a public, baccalaureate degree-granting college or university. In this…

According to the author, the lack of diversity in graduate programs is a national crisis. A May 2005 report by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation indicated that, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up 32 percent of all U.S. citizens in the normal age range of Ph.D. candidates, only seven percent of all doctoral…