Reframing the US Attendance Crisis: School Absences Send Powerful Signals about Children Nationally

Some believe that holding schools accountable for student attendance will lead schools to act to reduce student absences and by doing so will increase student achievement, particularly for historically underserved students. We question both the premise that reducing absence will lead to substantial improvements in student achievement and fairness of holding school accountable for increasing attendance. Using two cohorts of nationally-representative data on kindergarteners, we find that factors unrelated to missed instruction account for at least 77 percent of the association between attendance and test score achievement among US children with twenty or more absences. We argue the attendance crisis conceals more troubling crises that will produce inequalities even if every child attends school every day, and that schools are ill-suited to address all the underlying causes of student absence. Absence is a symptom of the myriad challenges students and their families face—challenges that need to be addressed at a larger systemic level.

Protocols for Identification

The equitable identification of youth from all cultural, linguistic, and economic groups for gifted programming is a longstanding and tragic problem in gifted education. Many factors contribute to fallible, discriminatory identification practices, including identification based on manifest gifted behaviors alone (as opposed to gifted potential), on high cut-off scores on nationally normed instruments that yield differential results, and on exclusionary procedures where students must meet several criteria for identification or pass through a nomination gate for consideration. This chapter provides guidance for addressing access, equity, and missingness of underserved students in gifted education. Emphasis is placed on talent development, substantial changes to identification and programming, policy, and urgency to address systemic racism as steps critical to developing equitable, inclusive, socially just, and effective gifted education programming.

Defining Rigor in Justice-Oriented EdD Programs: Preparing Leaders to Disrupt and Transform Schools

Faculty in practitioner-oriented EdD programs must continually defend the presence of rigor in their programs. The existence of rigor determines the preparedness of our educational leaders to disrupt and transform educational organizations to bring about equitable and socially just outcomes; however, perceptions of rigor by the larger community impact the overall success of these programs and their students. In this conceptual article, we discuss the ways in which the literature defines rigor within and beyond practitioner-oriented EdD programs. We integrate that the literature with the critical need for social justice leadership, and leadership preparation toward that end, to offer a conceptual framework for designing, assessing, improving, communicating, and defending the rigor of EdD programs centered upon social justice. We posit: EdD programs can claim to be rigorous and centered upon social justice if their faculty: (1) collectively envision and construct rigorous student learning outcomes (rigor as a challenge) connected to the learning of critical theory and the demonstration of critical praxis to improve the lives of marginalized/underserved students; and (2) use backward-design to develop and align curriculum and pedagogy with those outcomes, including scholarly learning experiences (rigor in research) and the elicitation of students’ critical thinking (rigor as complexity).

Coming to College Hungry

This exploratory descriptive, single-university study (N=700) joined institutional, external, and survey data to examine first-year students’ food insecurity links to non-cognitive attributes and first-semester performance and persistence. Regressions indicate LGBTQ, multi-racial, international, transfer, and first-generation students exhibit increased food insecurity. Food insecurity linked with psychological distress, financial stress, amotivation, and intent to engage with peers but not to faculty, staff, and academic engagement. Food insecurity is also associated with lower first-semester GPA and credits earned. Findings strengthen limited evidence that food insecurity links to college students’ experience, suggesting groups of already-underserved students may need immediate support to ease food insecurity.

Sustaining Solutions in Undergraduate STEM Education

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs that attract and sustain student interest feature learning that is experiential, investigative, hands-on, personally significant to both students and faculty, connected to other inquiries, and suggestive of practical application to students’ lives. Such learning flourishes in a community in which faculty are committed equally to teaching, to maintaining their own intellectual vitality, and to partnering with students in learning, and in which institutional support for such a community exists. The Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience (CSIE) Program at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) is involved in retaining and increasing the number of STEM graduates by including faculty professional development, student connectedness to the sciences and mathematics through academic service-learning, and curricular reform. In this conference paper we report on the success of the CSIE program, including course development, student engagement, student success, especially among underserved students, and sustainability. This work is important because it offers insight into the development, sustainability, and scalability into faculty-driven STEM education reform spanning 15 years. Keywords: STEM education, retention strategies, undergraduate STEM, majors/non-majors

A Review of Evidence about Equitable School Leadership

This paper reviews the results of 63 empirical studies and reviews of research in order to identify those school leadership practices and dispositions likely to help improve equitable school conditions and outcomes for diverse and traditionally underserved students. Guided by a well-developed framework of successful school leadership, results indicate that most of the practices and dispositions in the framework can be enacted in ways that contribute to more equitable conditions and outcomes for students. A handful of these practices and dispositions appear to make an especially significant contribution to the development of more equitable schools as well as several additional practices and dispositions associated with equitable leadership merit mastery by equitably-oriented leaders. Among the especially significant practices are building productive partnerships among parents, schools, and the larger community as well as encouraging teachers to engage in forms of instruction with all students that are both ambitious and culturally responsive. Leaders are likely to be more effective when they adopt a critical perspective on the policies, practices, and procedures in their schools and develop a deep understanding of the cultures, norms, values, and expectations of the students’ families. The paper concludes with implications for practice and future research.

Comparing Technology-Based Reading Intervention Programs in Rural Settings

An ever-growing call for the use of evidence-based practice has come up against the logistical hurdles of a lack of resources and expertise, particularly in rural schools that work with historically underserved students. Although integrated learning systems (ILSs)—stable and likely requiring fewer resources than personnel—do not offer a complete solution to this problem, they may serve as a useful resource, particularly for milder literacy deficits. And yet, there is a surprising lack of empirical research on their effectiveness, particularly contemporary programs. This study examines the effectiveness and efficiency of two popular ILSs, Lexia and iStation, both of which use a blended model of computer and traditionally delivered instruction, and compares them against business-as-usual (BAU) conditions across a variety of outcomes. Results suggest both programs resulted in meaningful growth across an academic year of implementation, although generally no more so than that observed in the BAU condition. However, Lexia yielded the highest level of instructional efficiency. That is, despite comparable growth across conditions, Lexia required less staff time to implement per student participant.