Between 2015 and 2021, there has been a 34% increase in immigrant youth entering into K-12  with Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala as the top countries of origin (Sugarman 2023, 4). The United States Department of Education, under the Every Student, Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA), defines “immigrant youth” as students who are between the ages… Read More Title III Immigrant Subgrants: The Federal Subgrant that Determines the Success of America’s English Learner Immigrant Students by Abbey Gonzales

Introduction As the number of international students on college campuses continues to grow, issues regarding their classroom engagement are becoming more prominent (Canziani et al. 2024). International students often report increased psychological stress and difficulties in social adjustment, primarily due to interactions with faculty and peers, the dominance of the English language and White culture… Read More Learning from Validation Theory to Improve International Student Classroom Engagement by Kiya Ma

The demographic landscape of American classrooms is evolving, with an increasing proportion of students identified as having special needs or disabilities (National Center for Education Statistics 2023). The rising diversity challenges and offers opportunities for educators, requiring them to create inclusive learning environments that meet the needs of all students. Inclusive learning environments refer to… Read More Teacher Preparation for Increasing Classroom Diversity: Cultural Competence and Inclusive Strategies by Kristen Smigielski

Introduction America’s education system has been facing a crisis, evidenced by increasing homeschooling rates (Ray 2022) and the declining global rankings by PISA (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development 2016; Schleicher & Stewart 2008). America’s children – and by extension America itself – is rapidly falling behind its global contemporaries with various factors being cited… Read More STREAM: A Perspective to Evolve Education Towards the 22nd Century by Julie Muhlenfeld-Johnson, Sarah Mason, and Heather White

As teacher shortages are predicted to continue, it is important to evaluate teacher recruitment strategies and pipeline issues (Carver-Thomas et al. 2020). It is known that the demographics of students in K-12 schools have gotten increasingly diverse, as white students only make up 48% of the enrolled student population in elementary and secondary settings (NCES… Read More The Need to Recruit Teachers of Color – Considering a Local Perspective by Lillie Ko Wong

During 2024, there were 330 incidents of shootings on United States K-12 school campuses or with bullets hitting K-12 buildings (Gaultieri et al. 2024; Riedman 2024), including the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. Every mass school shooting has significant effects both immediate and rippling. After each one, the debate about guns and… Read More What Does it Mean for a School to be Safe? by Jennifer Classen

Introduction As academic scholars, researchers are constantly scrutinized by top-tier scholastic journals to maintain rigor in educational research in the face of the idiom ‘publish or perish’ in a tenure-track position. The intentional lines (re)drawn by colonialism within academia have built an infrastructure that insulates various epistemological foundations as ‘non-academic’ if they fall outside the… Read More Academia: An Image of Imperialism by Robert Lynn