Education and Family
-
Standardized Testing, College Success, and Diversity: Planning a Predictive Education
•
Policymakers and educators have a vested interest in ensuring that each space at universities be filled by the most capable candidates, as spaces are limited. This is especially true at public institutions. Because the majority of funds come from the government, each pupil represents a significant investment of the state’s…
-
Beyond Test Scores: How Can We Measure Social-Emotional Learning?
•
In recent years, educators and policymakers have expanded the conversation around student success by moving beyond standardized test scores. Social-emotional learning (SEL), in particular, has emerged as an important factor in student outcomes. The use of non-academic terms like “self-management” and “grit” has grown common among policymakers and educators, due…
-
Prenatal Stress and Cognitive Function: A Natural Experiment
•
It is well-documented that stress can jeopardize prenatal development. In fact, past studies have found a negative correlation between the amount of stress a mother experiences during pregnancy and the future cognitive abilities of her child. Since a child’s cognitive abilities can heavily influence his or her life outcomes, it…
-
Culture, Virtue, and Education: How Perceptions of Learning Affect Success
•
Researchers have long sought to explain what conditions may contribute to a student’s academic success. East Asian students have been some of the more demonstrably successful in the United States, leaving experts to grapple with what may be causing these better outcomes, as proper analysis of such a learning model…
-
Food for Thought: SNAP Distribution and Student Achievement
•
Decades of innovative education reform have focused on how to improve schools, yet academic success is about more than just classrooms and teachers. One factor that may affect student achievement is food stability; researchers and policymakers are asking how a student’s access to nutritional food impacts that student’s success in…
-
What Happens After a School Closes?
•
School closure can be a jarring process for students, families and communities. Over the past decade, school closures have become a lightning rod, sparking debate across the country. These closures raise several key questions, including where students go after a low-performing school closes and how students perform academically after their…
-
How Does Vocational Education Impact Income Gaps?
•
Education plays an important role in countering inequality, and education policy can be an efficient tool for policymakers to reduce income disparities. According to the Economic Policy Institute, on average, a family in the top one percent of the U.S. income distribution earned 26.3 times as much as a family…
-
Increasing the Demand for Education With Unconditional Cash Transfers
•
Sub-Saharan Africa hosts the majority of the 124 million children not enrolled in school across the globe. Education plays a key role in improving individual and social well-being, but high poverty impedes access to quality education. This cycle of poverty can be broken by reducing the burden of the financial…
-
Achieving Sustainable Development By Prioritizing Gender: An Interview with Ginette Azcona
•
On January 1, 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development—adopted by 193 United Nations member countries in September 2015—officially took effect. Among the goals is a commitment to achieve gender equality and end all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere.…
-
Major Choices: What Pushes Women Out of STEM Fields?
•
Although women have entered the workforce and obtained degrees in higher education in increasing numbers over the past several decades, the wage disparity between genders persists. This phenomenon can be partially explained by differences in choices of college majors: women tend to choose majors associated with lower-paying jobs, such as…
-
The Data Doesn’t Seem to Be Vouching for Vouchers
•
Arguments supporting private management of schools date back to the founding of the United States and have reflected a variety of ideological positions. The call for privatization policies like school vouchers intensified in the mid-20th century due largely to the assertions of economist Milton Friedman. Friedman proposed that the government…