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Dual enrollment in high school is viewed by many as one mechanism for increasing college admission and completion of low-income students. However, little evidence demonstrates that these students discretely benefit from dual enrollment and whether these programs narrow attainment gaps vis-à-vis students from middle-class or affluent family backgrounds. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study (N = 8,800), I find significant benefits in boosting rates of college degree attainment for low-income students while holding weaker effects for peers from more affluent backgrounds. These results remain even with analyses from newer data of college freshman of 2004. I conduct sensitivity analyses and find that these results are robust to relatively large unobserved confounders. However, expanding dual enrollment programs would modestly reduce gaps in degree attainment.

I examine whether academic motivation and engagement--conditions that advocates consider mechanisms for the effect of dual enrollment--account for the relationship between dual enrollment and academic performance. Few studies examine the claimed mechanisms that account for the impact of dual enrollment, which leaves the processes through which dual enrollment influences a student's college experience as a black box. Using data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, I find a positive direct effect of dual enrollment on first-year college GPA, which remains even after controlling for precollege variables. I further find students who participated in dual enrollment are more academically motivated and engaged than nonparticipants. Although dual enrolled students are more academically motivated and engaged in class than nonparticipants these indicators generally account for less than 20% of the effect of dual enrollment on academic performance. Finally, for some students (e.g., students who earned college credit through dual enrollment but not though examination), participation in dual enrollment exerts a stronger effect on first-year college GPA at midselective and very selective institutions than at highly selective institutions.

Desegregation policies have been rolled back across the country. Some advocates for dismantling desegregation argue that resources allocated to desegregation would pay off better if allocated to improve education in schools with disadvantaged populations. We test this claim by examining student achievement before, during, and after the end of court-ordered desegregation in Nashville, Tennessee. School-by-grade fixed effect models reveal no evidence that increases in a school's proportion of Black students impeded achievement growth. Increased exposure to students in poverty curtailed achievement growth, but enhanced option schools, which bring extraordinary resources to high-poverty, racially isolated schools, compensated for the effects of concentrated poverty. Schools that became specialized magnet schools, however, did not contribute to achievement gains and in some cases curtailed growth.

I examine the influence of dual enrollment, a program that allows students to take college courses and earn college credits while in high school, on academic performance and college readiness. Advocates consider dual enrollment as a way to transition high school students into college, and they further claim that these programs benefit students from low socioeconomic status (SES). However, few researchers examine the impact of dual enrollment on academic performance and college readiness, in particular, whether SES differences exist in the impact of dual enrollment. Even fewer researchers consider the extent to which improved access to dual enrollment reduces SES gaps in academic performance and college readiness. I find that participation in dual enrollment increases first-year GPA and decreases the likelihood for remediation. I conduct sensitivity analysis and find that results are resilient to large unobserved confounders that could affect both selection to dual enrollment and the outcome. Moreover, I find that low-SES students benefit from dual enrollment as much as high-SES students. Finally, I find that differences in program participation account for little of the SES gap in GPA and remediation.

Using data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNSLAE), this study considered institutions as “incubators,” where institutions develop students by providing them with essential resources and services to thrive. This approach also recognizes the importance of institutional norms and identities in shaping students’ social and cultural competencies. Moreover, we used a person-centered approach to identify students’ participation patterns in high-impact practices (HIPs). Instead of examining relations among variables—as with variable-centered approaches—person-centered approaches find similarities in a collection of variables to identify distinct student types. This approach allows us to understand the interconnections between students and their college environment through their participation patterns in HIPs. We identified five student types based on their participation patterns in HIPs: nonparticipant, career focused, experiential learner, academically oriented, and active engager. Almost 23% of the variance in students’ patterns in HIP participation lies across institutions. Controlling for a host of student-level characteristics and college experiences marginally accounted for this institution-level variance. Instead, institution type accounted for the largest share of the variance, which is consistent with an institutional identity and norms of liberal education.

Purpose There is growing recognition of the importance of educator diversity. The purpose of this paper is to examine the production, placement and employment of school leaders as assistant principals, principals and school leaders in Texas by the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender over 23 years. Design/methodology/approach This is a quantitative study that employs multilevel logistic regression analysis to examine using 25 years of educator employment data from Texas. Findings The authors find descriptive evidence of an increase in diversity of school leaders driven by a decreasing percentage of white men educators and an increasing percentage of Latina educators. Important differences, however, emerge when examining assistant principal vs principal positions, particularly with respect to the odds of being hired. The authors find black male and Latino educators are more likely than white male educators to be hired as an assistant principal but are less likely than white male educators to be hired as a principal. Women educators, regardless of race/ethnicity were less likely to be hired as assistant principals or principals relative to white male educators. Women of color had the lowest odds of being hired in any position relative to white male educators. With respect to school leader preparation program accountability, the authors find few program characteristics associated with placement and differences between programs explained very little of the variation in placement rates, bringing into question efforts to hold programs accountable for such outcomes. Originality/value A longitudinal examination of racial/ethnic and gender intersectionality over 25 years is a unique contribution to the study of inequitable access to school leadership positions.

Future research would examine the effects of the four-day school week on teacher recruitment and retention in multiple districts, expanding data collection to also include urban and suburban school districts. According to Why Rural Matters 2023 (Hartman et al., 2023), the average salary for teachers in rural districts is substantially lower than the average for non-rural districts, even after adjusting for local wage differences (average $76,374 compared with $81,645 for non-rural). [...]our study helps to solidify previous research on a four-day school week (e.g., Turner, Finch & Uribe-Zarain, 2019) by examining the consequences of this new policy in a different state context. Because of our prior relationship with one of the building principals, the school superintendent invited us to observe the fall 2018 school board meeting to hear a presentation by the school leadership team about the possibility of moving the Carver Community School District (CCSD; a pseudonym) to a four-day school week.

We examine the influence of collaborative learning on need for cognition among students from 17 institutions over four years of college. Net of a wide battery of potential confounding influences including precollege academic ability, race, and a pretest of the outcome measure, for example, we find collaborative learning is associated with gains in need for cognition. Moreover, we find three subconstructs of deep approaches to learning mediate this relationship. Specifically, exposure to collaborative learning activities increases students' use of higher-order learning, integrative learning, and reflective learning, which, in turn, leads to gains in need for cognition.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether engaging in collaborative learning influences persistence to the 2nd year of college among 2,987 college freshmen at 19 institutions. Considering potential confounders such as sex, race, precollege academic ability, type of institution attended, college coursework taken, academic motivation, and the clustered nature of the data, those students who engage in collaborative learning are significantly more likely than students who do not learn collaboratively to persist to the 2nd year of college. The results of our analyses suggest the influence of collaborative learning on persistence affects students similarly, regardless of individual differences by sex, race, or tested precollege academic ability. Lastly, the influence of collaborative learning on persistence appears to be mediated by peer interactions. That is, learning collaboratively leads to greater levels of positive peer interactions, which in turn is associated with greater odds of persisting to the 2nd year of college.