With the growing demand for highly skilled workers and declining wages for those who are less skilled, low-income youth with limited education and no work experience have few opportunities for gainful employment. Since the Great Depression, the federal government has been funding programs that provide low-income, out-of-school, and unemployed…

Literacy-Embedded Play Centers (LEPC) are important components of preschool classrooms. These centers encourage the development of literacy skills in an environment that promotes play and interaction with literacy tools. By highlighting the process teacher candidates used to plan, construct, and implement LEPC, a framework for development is…

William Faulkner famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." He would not be surprised to learn that Americans, 150 years after the Civil War began, are still getting it wrong. Did America's most divisive war start over slavery or states' rights? The author says that too many people--including educators--get it wrong. The author…

The author has spent much of his working life studying and promoting student loans. As a good liberal Democrat, he spent years arguing for the expansion of the old Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) which had its roots in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. His professional life included stints working for one of the nonprofit FFELP…

The language that students and teachers use to describe what they like best about M. O. Ramay Junior High School is strikingly similar. Both groups talk at length about how they are treated with respect and given freedom. Teachers describe the freedom to teach and students describe the freedom to be an individual. Both groups quickly add that with…

In this article, the authors offer an interpretation of the history of the "Healthy People" initiative showing that the outcomes remain largely the same, with appropriate decennial adjustment of the proliferating numerical targets and increased delineation of objectives for special populations. But the strategies by which those outcomes are to be…

Preschool parent interventions may produce downstream benefits if initial intervention gains are sustained and improve later socialization experiences. This study explored associations between initial effects of the REDI (Research-based Developmentally Informed) Parent program and later benefits. A randomized trial involving 200 Head Start…

Education data can empower educators, students, parents, and policymakers with the information they need to make the best decisions to improve student achievement, information that can move the nation toward an education system in which every student graduates prepared for college and career. Safeguarding the privacy of student data is a critical…

In 2009 the U.S. Department of Education announced the requirements and selection criteria for the monies attached to the Race to the Top Fund. The monies attached to this competition were awarded during phase one, phase two, and phase three. This casual comparative study examined the impact of the Race to the Top federal education competition on…

Purpose/Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the 2009-2010 USDA Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP) on fruit intake and other behaviors related to fruit and vegetable consumption among Wisconsin fourth- and fifth-grade students. Methods: Participants were fourth- and fifth-grade from one FFVP school (n = 51)…

This mixed-methods research examined the relationships between burnout, as measured by the Counselor Burnout Inventory (CBI), demographic and organizational variables as indicated by literature, and the assignment of non-counseling duties, as measured by the School Counselors Activity Rating Scale (SCARS) with a national sample of professional…

This research examines the short term success of a postsecondary federal financial aid program, the SMART Grant, designed to increase this stock of scientific human capital. An exploration of the success of this program provides the opportunity to address two critically important research questions. Do financial incentives encourage students to…

To ensure that students have access to the full range of financial aid they may need to succeed, colleges must be able to confidently and responsibly offer federal student loans. The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS) and the California Community Colleges Student Financial Aid Administrators' Association (CCCSFAAA) support…

This study aims to determine whether educational accountability promotes educational triage. This study exploits a natural experiment in North Carolina in which standards increased first in math in 2006 and second in reading in 2008 to determine whether an increase in educational standards caused an increase in educational triage at the expense of…

The National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs, administered by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), are key components of the nation's food security safety net, providing free or low-cost meals to millions of schoolchildren each day. To qualify their children each year for free or…