Suchergebnisse

Safety is one of the primary reasons why parents report seeking out a school of choice in depressed cities with a high proportion of charter schools. However, little empirical research has examined how parents assess school safety in these settings. This study explores factors that parents associate with school safety in Detroit, Michigan by conducting semi-structured interviews with parents ( n = 31) in both charter and public schools. To contextualize parents' perceptions of school safety, teachers ( n = 23) were also interviewed. Findings indicate that parental perceptions of safety were shaped by school building conditions, school disciplinary environment, school-based parental involvement, student selection, and school location. These perceived indicators of safety suggest that components of school climate may be important for raising perceptions of safety in challenging contexts where school safety is a pressing concern.

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a federal program that provides free and reduced priced lunch to millions of low-income children in urban schools. Empirical research shows mixed results on the physical and nutritional health of urban students participating in the program. However, a considerable limitation of this literature is that it focuses on student participation in the NSLP rather than what students consume when they receive a school lunch. By directly collecting a random of sample of school lunches, we analyze the nutritional content of both selected and consumed school lunches ( n = 141) at a Title I middle school in a large US city. Results indicated that the food items that students select for school lunch are low in nutrients and high in sugar. Furthermore, food that students ultimately consumed during lunch had even lower nutritional value while consumption of sugar remained high. Future research is needed to investigate school-based interventions that leaders can deploy to foster healthy eating in urban schools.

Previous analyses of large national datasets have tended to report a negative relationship between parental homework help and student achievement. Yet these studies have not examined heterogeneity in this relationship based on the propensity for a parent to provide homework help. By using a propensity score–based approach, this study investigates the relationship between daily parental homework help in first grade and student achievement in third grade with nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Class. Results indicated that low prior achievement, socioeconomic disadvantage, and minority status were associated with a high propensity to provide daily homework help. Daily parental homework help was also associated with improved achievement for children whose parents had a high propensity to provide daily homework help. These patterns suggest that complex factors induce daily parental homework help and that these factors are related to heterogeneity in the relationship between daily parental homework help and achievement.