Leveraging publicly available data about schools' absenteeism from the New Jersey Department of Education, the present study examined how neighborhood-level resource deprivation and violent crime related to chronic absenteeism in Passaic County's elementary, middle, and high schools. Results highlighted geographic disparities in Passaic County, New Jersey, whereby predominantly racial/ethnic, under-resourced, communities of color have significantly greater levels of resource deprivation and threat. Additionally, greater neighborhood-level resource deprivation and neighborhood violent crime were associated with higher rates and trajectories of absenteeism across three academic school years. These findings highlight the importance of considering neighborhood context in absenteeism prevention programs.

We use novel information about fixture-specific water lead levels (WLLs) in Portland, Oregon schools to explore inequalities in students' potential for exposure to lead in drinking water at school. We find that Black and Hispanic students were in classrooms with higher WLLs than White students primarily because they attended different schools. The elevated exposure of students with non-English first languages was also largely driven by sorting into different schools, although there were marginally significant differences between students within the same school. Our findings underscore the importance of broadly targeted remediation efforts like those implemented in Portland to address environmental injustices.

Charter school policy represents two simultaneous forms of accountability, in which schools are accountable to both parents and authorizers. This study of a K-8 charter renewal decision interrogates these accountability relationships and the role of race and power in privileging the interests of particular stakeholders over others. Using counternarrative methodology and qualitative interviews and observations, we draw on critical race theory and new managerialism to make sense of the competing accounts surrounding a non-renewal process. We find four areas of tension, in which district officials subscribe to new managerialist authorizing styles that leave little room for participation from the Black and low-income school community. We conclude with recommendations for how districts can partner with communities to work toward frameworks of accountability that value the goals of multiple stakeholder groups.

In recent years, districts have paid special attention to the common practice of "district hopping," families bending geographic school assignment rules by sending a child to a school in a district where the child does not formally reside-usually to a district that is more desirable because of higher performing schools or greater educational resources. In several high-profile cases, mothers who engaged in district hopping were charged with "grand theft" of educational services. By situating these cases in the broader context of market-based reforms, we refocus attention on the responses of districts rather than the actions of parents. We argue that increased privatization of education and growing dominance of a "private-goods" model of schooling create the conditions necessary for framing these actions as "theft."

Parent involvement is a robust predictor of academic achievement, but little is known about school- and home-based involvement in immigrant families. Drawing on ecological theories, the present study examined contextual characteristics as predictors of parent involvement among Afro-Caribbean and Latino parents of young students in urban public schools. Socioeconomic disadvantage was associated with lower home-based involvement. Several factors were associated with higher involvement, including parents' connection to their culture of origin and to U.S. culture, engagement practices by teachers and parent-teacher ethnic consonance (for Latinos only). Findings have implications for promoting involvement among immigrant families of students in urban schools.

Educational achievement is a key determinant of future life chances, but children growing up in poverty tend to do worse by many academic measures. Family, school, and neighborhood contextual characteristics may affect academic outcomes. In an attempt to explore neighborhood and individual level factors, we performed multilevel analyses to explain child's behavioral problems, repeat grade, average math and reading scores. Outcome measures were associated with specific neighborhood characteristics, above and beyond the effect of student/family level factors. The findings warrant further consideration of ecological interventions aiming to improve academic and behavioral outcomes of children living in poverty.

The present study investigated the relationships between the timing of women's first childbirth and their postsecondary education using an inner-city minority cohort. The study sample (695 females) was drawn from the Chicago Longitudinal Study (CLS), an on-going investigation of a panel of low-income minority children (94% African American) born in 1980 who grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods in Chicago. The findings indicated that, taking into account sociodemographic factors and early academic achievement, first childbirths before age 18 and between ages 19 and 21 were significantly associated with lower rates of college attendance and bachelor (BA) degree completion. First childbirths between ages 21 and 25 were not significantly associated with any outcome of postsecondary education.