Education Policy Commons^™

Constructing Curriculum: Centering Identities In Sex Education, Jozette Belmont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sex education (sex ed) is a state-by-state and school-by-school issue, and there are no federal laws which mandate medically accurate education. In New York, schools only offer one semester of health education which often happens in the last semester of twelfth grade. Further, LGBTQIA+ people’s sexual health and identities are rarely mentioned. Therefore, this project asks: What are the ways sex ed curricula and policies in New York address the needs of LGBTQIA+ youth? To answer this question, I use a critical policy analysis to compare curriculum from the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) and Peer Health ...

A Cross National Comparison Of Family Friendly Work Policies: The Potential Influence Of Cultural Values, Adeline Grace Hardten

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Around the world people must work for a living, but also must raise their families. To balance these obligations, parents need high levels of support. But the existence of family friendly work policies, defined as paid parental leave and affordable, high-quality childcare, vary significantly across nations, making it difficult for many to obtain the necessary support. Research indicates that countries providing supportive family friendly policies see economic benefits, increases in profitability, and stronger overall youth development. Even though research reveals strong positive outcomes, there is a deficiency of exploration into why more countries still lack comprehensive policies that support working ...

Migration And Inequalities In The Face Of Covid-19: Vulnerable Populations And Support Networks In Mexico And The United States, Claudia Masferrer

Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Research

Our world changed drastically on February 11th 2020 when the World Health Organization announced the name of the new coronavirus disease as COVID-19, and the pandemic was later considered the greatest challenge we have faced since World War II. Although we have started to experience social life in various new ways, the impacts that it will bring are still unknown. In recent years, migration had already undergone different transformations globally, and more changes are expected. How will populations on the move and migrant populations live in the following years post-COVID, and how different actors will respond to these changes, is ...

How Much Is Too Much?: Administrative Burden And Texas State Policy, Dominique J. Baker

Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Research

Several states, including Texas, have implemented an “excess semester credit hours (ESCH)” policy. State ESCH policies assess a fee to students at public institutions when they exceed a set number of lifetime cumulative credit hours (e.g., students with more than the 120 credit hours needed for a bachelor’s degree). Little is known about the administrative burden the implementation of and communication about state ESCH policies places on students. Therefore, I conducted a document analysis of the websites of all Texas public institutions. I analyzed 120 documents that were collected from November 2019 to April 2020. While some institutions ...

It Shouldn’T Take A Pandemic To Increase School Meal Access For Low-Income Students: A Two-Step Floating Catchment Area Analysis Of School Meal Access During Covid-19, Jason Jabbari, Yung Chun, Pranav Nandan, Laura Mcdermott, Tyler Frank, Dan Ferris, Sarah Moreland-Russell, Stephen Roll

Social Policy Institute Research

COVID-19 created an additional barrier for students who benefit from free school meals. While some schools attempted to provide alternative meal access points, many students lack adequate transportation. Thus, physical proximity to meal access points is particularly important during the pandemic. Taking into account both the “supply” and the “demand” for free meals, we employed a two-step floating catchment area analysis to analyze meal accessibility in St. Louis, MO. Overall, while meal access during the spring 2020 semester was substantially lower than the spring 2019 semester, meal access during the 2020 summer was substantially higher than the 2019 summer. Moreover ...

Charter School Funding: Inequity Surges In The Cities, Corey A. Deangelis, Patrick Wolf, Larry Maloney, Jay F. May

School Choice Demonstration Project

Public charter schools increasingly are part of both the national conversation about education policy and the local urban scene in America. Previous studies of public charter schools have examined their achievement effects focused on both the state and metropolitan levels, and funding disparities focused on the state levels. This report is the latest update to a series of studies of funding inequities concentrating on revenue disparities between charters and traditional public schools where charters are most common: metropolitan areas across the country. The 18 urban areas that primarily inform our study include Atlanta, Boston, Camden, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis ...

Income Loss And Financial Distress During Covid-19: The Protective Role Of Liquid Assets, Stephen Roll, Mathieu Despard

Social Policy Institute Research

Nearly a quarter of U.S. households have experienced job or income losses related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Liquid assets mitigate financial distress in the face of financial shocks such as job loss, yet this relationship in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic is unknown. Using a nationally representative sample of U.S. households (N = 4,383) who completed a survey in the early days of the pandemic, we examined pre-pandemic liquid assets as a moderator of the relationship between job and income loss and difficulty meeting financial obligations and use of high-cost financial resources. Estimates from propensity score-weighted linear ...

Access To Education And Affordable Housing (Panel Discussion), Serge Martinez, Deb Haaland

Faculty Scholarship

"Housing is not just about housing--there's a straight line from housing stability to educational achievement and other issues including public health, physical and mental health and community development."
- Professor Serge Martinez.

Congresswoman Deb Haaland held a discussion on access to education and affordable housing, particularly the importance of accessible education and the role evictions and financial stress play in education.

If the video is not playing, watch the panel discussion on Facebook (log-in not required).

Nevada System Of Higher Education (Nshe) Administrative Costs, 2019, Olivia K. Cheche, Saha Salahi, Marie A. Falcone, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Higher Education

The purpose of this Fact Sheet is to examine expenditures of the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE), particularly expenses allocated to staff salaries. This data is collected from the FY19 State of Nevada operating budget, and Transparent Nevada, a website that posts the salaries of public employees including NSHE staff.

Engagement With Career And Technical Education In Tennessee High Schools: Interim Report, Ge Wu, Celeste Carruthers

GPL Reports

Throughout much of the United States, career and technical education (CTE) is offered as one or more elective sequences within comprehensive high schools. We know very little about why students select into CTE in such systems, or more generally, whether the labor market affects students’ choice of coursework in high school. We test whether changes in the local labor market align with and affect course enrollments in three “in-demand” CTE career clusters in Tennessee: advanced manufacturing, information technology, and health science. We find evidence of roughly proportionate alignment between changes in advanced manufacturing CTE course-taking and changes in local manufacturing ...

Increasing Individuals’ Economic Stability Through Massachusetts’ Career And Technical Education, Shaun Dougherty, Isabel Harbaugh Macdonald, Walter G. Ecton, Daniel Kreisman

GPL Working Papers

High-school based career and technical education (CTE) programs continue to grow, fueled by labor market demand and federal funding. Amid concerns over declining rates of economic mobility and stagnating earnings for low-wage workers, the academic landscape in America’s secondary schools now places extensive focus on workforce preparation as part of the curriculum. Nationally, CTE is the most popular type of elective taken by high school students, with roughly 80 percent of high school students taking at least one course. Using data from Massachusetts, researchers from the CTEx consortium estimated that students who participated in specialized CTE programs in high ...

Policy Point-Counterpoint: Can Colleges And Universities Maintain High Quality Connections With Students Through Virtual Platforms?, Laura C. Atkins, Michele Giunti, Alexis Smith

International Social Science Review

In this policy point-counterpoint, the ability of higher educational institutions to provide quality connections with their students via virtual learning platforms is debated.

Cut Me Some Slack! Slack Resources And Technology-Mediated Human Capital Investments In Entrepreneurship, Jason Jabbari, Stephen Roll, Sam Bufe, Yung Chun

Social Policy Institute Research

In this paper, we explore the impact that slack resources and technology can have on individuals' entrepreneurial aspirations. Focusing on human capital investments that individuals make through education and work that involve both slack resources and technology, we explore the relationship among formal online learning opportunities, informal skill development in the gig economy, and entrepreneurial aspirations. Leveraging a novel dataset that merges administrative tax data with a survey of over 8,528 low and moderate-income households, we use machine learning and propensity score weighting to examine the likelihood that individuals who make these technology-mediated human capital investments will have increased ...

The State Of Free Speech On College Campuses, Romolo Peterson

The Macksey Journal

There is a growing concern about the gradual erosion of free speech on college campuses. In a recent New York Times article, the political commentator Nicholas Kristof noted: “Too often we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological . . . We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us -- so long as they think like us.” In this paper, I will review several specific examples of the suppression of free speech at Yale University, the University of California - Berkeley, and the University of Missouri. I will discuss the most common forms of censorship on college campuses, including ...

Covid-19: Working Parents And Child Care In The Mountain West, Olivia K. Cheche, Vanessa Booth, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet synthesizes data on child-care dependent parents in various Mountain West metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). This synthesis is based on an original report by Brookings Research Analyst, Nicole Bateman, titled “Working parents are key to COVID-19 recovery.” Additionally, this fact sheet highlights other variables that include the race-ethnic breakdown, education attainment, and federal poverty breakdown for child-care dependent parents.

The Effect Of Free School Meals On Bmi And Student Attendance, Will Davis, Daniel Kreisman, Tareena Musaddiq

GPL Working Papers

We estimate the effect of new access to universal free school meals resulting from the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) on child BMI and attendance. Under the CEP, schools with 40 percent or more of students who qualify for free school meals can offer free breakfast and lunch to all students. With administrative data from a large school district, we use student-level BMI measures from the FitnessGramÓ to compare within student outcomes before and after the implementation of the CEP across CEP-eligible and non-eligible schools. We find that exposure to the CEP increased BMI by about 0.07 standard deviations, equal ...

Understanding Gender Differences In Traditional And Cyberbullying: An Evaluation Of Construct Validity Of The 2013 School Crime Supplement To The National Crime Victimization Survey, Anthony Betancourt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Few measures assess cyberbullying and traditional bullying simultaneously while also reporting standards of reliability and validity. As a result, it remains unclear whether cyberbullying should be considered a separate type of bullying. This dissertation advances the literature by examining data from the 2013 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS-SCS) to provide psychometric information about the factor structure of the 2013 NCVS-SCS traditional and cyberbullying scales. Furthermore, the dissertation uses that information to evaluate if cyberbullying emerges as a unique factor. Finally, measurement invariance will determine if bullying holds the same meaning for boys and girls (e ...

Statutory Immunity For Educators: An Analysis Of Decisions By The Texas Commissioner Of Education And Texas Appellate Courts After House Bill 4, Melissa Ballou Kates

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative legal study explored statutory immunity protection provided to Texas educators under the Texas Education Code §22.0511 and §22.0512. The Texas legislature enacted the statutory immunity provisions as part of House Bill 4 and tort reform in 2003. Researchers have called for more balance when providing immunity protections for educators. The researcher limited the study to Texas Commissioner of Education decisions and Texas appellate court cases. The study utilized a legal framework to determine under what circumstances the rulings of statutory immunity shields educators from liability. The findings in this study provide evidence that Texas educators have ...

Covid-19: The Risk Of Reopening Nevada Schools, Caitlin J. Saladino, Madison Frazee-Bench, Yanneli Llamas, Magdalena Martinez, William E. Brown Jr.

K-12 Education

This fact sheet presents data on Nevada schools, drawing from the New York Times report, “The risk that students could arrive at school with the Coronavirus,” published on July 31, 2020. Various risk scenarios are presented based on school size for the local conditions in 17 Nevada counties.

Weaving The Braid Of Culturally Responsive Leadership Within Policy And Governance To Improve Indigenous Student Success, Shelly L. Niemi

The Organizational Improvement Plan at Western University

This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) explores a Problem of Practice (PoP) that highlights the need for why the Board of Education and the Senior Administration team within the Raven Bay School Division (RBSD, pseudonym) would benefit from using a culturally responsive leadership approach when making decisions and how this may be achieved through policy and governance to guide their practice. The goal of this OIP is to examine why this leadership approach would be relevant for the Board of Education and the Senior Leadership team when they are making any policy and governance decisions, as it relates to Indigenous Education ...