How Finance Reform May Alter Teacher and School Quality: California’s $23 Billion Initiative

Gains in school spending helped to lift achievement over the past half century. But California’s ambitious effort—progressively distributing $23 billion in yearly funding to poorer districts—has yet to reduce disparities in learning. We theorize how administrators in districts and schools, given organizational habits and labor constraints, may fail to move quality resources to disadvantaged students. We identify the exogenous portion of California’s post-2013 reform, finding that schools receiving progressively targeted funding tended to hire inexperienced teachers and disproportionately assign novices to courses serving English learners. New funding expanded the array of courses in high schools, as access to college-preparatory classes by English learners declined. These unfair mechanisms operated most strongly in high-needs schools serving larger concentrations of poor students.

An Evaluation of the Educational Impact of College Campus Visits: A Randomized Experiment

We study whether visits to a college campus during eighth grade affect students’ interest in and preparation for college. Two cohorts of eighth graders were randomized within schools to a control condition, in which they received a college informational packet, or a treatment condition, in which they received the same information and visited a flagship university three times during an academic year. We estimate the effect of the visits on students’ college knowledge, postsecondary intentions, college preparatory behaviors, academic engagement, and ninth-grade course enrollment. Treated students exhibit higher levels of college knowledge, efficacy, and grit, as well as a higher likelihood of conversing with school personnel about college. Additionally, treated students are more likely to enroll in advanced science/social science courses. We find mixed evidence on whether the visits increased students’ diligence on classroom tasks and a negative impact on students’ desire to attend technical school.

The College Preparatory Pipeline: Disparate Stages in Academic Opportunities

The rise in college preparatory coursework across American high schools appears not to affect college enrollment and graduation rates. This study uses the Civil Rights Data Collection to evaluate three stages along the college preparatory pipeline: access to, enrollment in, and mastery of Advanced Placement® and International Baccalaureate® coursework to understand the cumulative academic opportunities shaping students’ college readiness. Leaks in the pipeline divert out historically marginalized students. An adaptation of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index captures the magnitude of these racial and ethnic disparities. Social context explains where school and district resources alleviate disparities to provide more equitable (i.e., proportionally representative) academic opportunities. These findings offer substantive direction to improve equality in students’ college readiness opportunities.

STEM for All: Student Identities and the Paradox of STEM Democratization

Background/Context Calls to increase participation in and access to STEM education have been loud and frequent. These democratizing efforts have targeted the aspirations and expectations of non-dominant students attending U.S. secondary schools, promising pathways to college and opportunities for social mobility, yet the results have been mixed. While some exemplars exist, recent research has identified a number of social and structural challenges that undermine the stated goals of policy initiatives and fail to yield positive student outcomes. Purpose Drawing upon the authors’ notion of shadow capital, an extension of Bourdieu's theoretical framework, and Holland, Lachincotte, Skinner, and Cain's theory of figured worlds, this article explores how high-achieving students from non-dominant backgrounds construct their academic identities amid limited STEM material and discursive structures in two urban, non-selective, public, STEM-focused schools. In so doing, we aim to extend and complicate the literature on STEM reform and its ability to provide opportunity and improve outcomes for non-dominant students. Research Design The findings reported herein are part of a larger ethnographic, longitudinal, and comparative study of eight non-selective, urban public high schools serving primarily economically and racially non-dominant students. Data consist of interviews with multiple stakeholders, sustained participant and non-participant observation, and document analysis. In this article we focus on two STEM-focused schools, STEM Academy and Broadway Science Academy (BSA), and primarily draw upon interview data given our emphasis on student identity development. Findings/Results As a result of a mismatch between the intention and outcome of STEM reform as it plays out in this study, each school provided students with shadow capital. Given the different school contexts, the effects of this shadow capital on students’ STEM identities vary across site. In the case of STEM Academy, students develop conflicted STEM identities amid the school's own conflicted institutional identity as both STEM-focused and college preparatory. In the case of BSA, students are provided opportunities that are seen as more “connected” to student-lived experiences, resulting in vocational pathways devoid of the elements that truly bridge home and school in ways that create opportunity, complicating students’ ability to actualize their college and career aspirations. Conclusions/Recommendations In order to create authentic and meaningful connected STEM opportunities that allow students to draw from their own stores of capital and nurture STEM identities, we need to reevaluate and re-envision the “good intentions” undergirding the democratization of education and ask whether efforts to democratize STEM are plausible within our deeply stratified system.

The Philosophies and Development of a Free Education

This chapter traces the development of Vietnam's education system when the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) took over. At the time, the Ministry of Education (MOE) continued the French-style centralized educational system. Other developments included an overwhelming preponderance of college-preparatory high schools and a dichotomy of one system for technical agricultural schools and another for university in higher education. The chapter shows that it was during the early years of the RVN that the RVN's first educational guiding principle emerged, which was nationalism. However, education in general did not undergo significant changes for the newly formed republic, which faced multiple reorganizations and political realignments. The education system continued to be viewed as a legacy rather than a Vietnamese system that would serve the needs of Vietnamese society. This began to change in the 1950s, when it was established that Vietnamese education should be “nationalistic,” “humanistic,” and of “open mind for changes.”

Introduction

This introductory chapter shows how many of the identity challenges that Latinx and Black students experience result from how race-ethnicity increases the likelihood that they are also first-generation college students; that they attended high schools that did not offer a rigorous college preparatory curriculum; that they have to work for pay to afford college; that they cannot be carefree students and must help support the families they left behind; and that they must contend with many other nontraditional college student challenges. It discusses research and news media portrayals of minority student persistence. To that end, the chapter briefly introduces a cohort of approximately five hundred Black and Latinx college freshmen who enrolled in fall 2013. It reveals that these students were asking for access to counterspaces—safe spaces that simultaneously validate and critique one's interconnected self and group identity—that would enable radical growth. Radical growth can be understood as the development of ideas and narratives that challenge dominant representations of and notions about their marginalized identities.