Faculty Research Projects

Established by the Oklahoma State Legislature in 1998, the universal pre-K (UPK) program provides free, high-quality pre-K services to all four-year-old children irrespective of household income. Oklahoma was the second state to establish a UPK program, and its penetration rate – estimated at 74 percent – is one of the highest in the U.S. This project examines the longer-term impacts of UPK. Students from the early cohorts of UPK are now in the later high school grades. The study examines whether or not attending UPK is related to longer-term success measured by high school course taking, graduation/drop out, and standardized test scores. This project also examines if particular sub-groups of children benefited more from attending UPK. It will add to the growing understanding of the longer-term impacts of more modern early childhood education programs. (Funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation)

Wisconsin (WI) has experienced a drastic decline in the number of regulated early care and education (ECE) providers operating in the state in the past 15 years. Although fluctuations in the market are to be expected, the persistent decline in the number of providers has been coupled in recent years with a decline in the number of children receiving child care subsidies through the WI Shares subsidy program. These declines are concerning not only because it might force some children into low-quality or unsafe care environments, but also because it may result in higher prices for the care that is available as well as lower levels of employment for parents who cannot find affordable ECE. Claessens is leading a partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families to examine these changes. The partnership will use existing data sources to describe changes in the supply of regulated ECE providers and WI Shares participation across counties from 2005-2019 and to examine how within-county changes in economic, demographic, and ECE policy-related factors relate to changes in ECE supply and WI Shares participation. To triangulate and complement their findings, the partnership will collect new data to obtain a more in-depth understanding of reasons why licensed providers close and why Shares-eligible children do not participate in the program. To address these questions, the partnership will conduct qualitative interviews with recently-closed, licensed providers and with a brief telephone survey of parents with subsidy-eligible children who do not use the program. (Grant #90YE0217, Department of Health and Human Services, ACF, OPRE)

This project aims to improve our understanding of early math instruction and how to provide children with the best mathematical opportunities in these early and important years of school. Claessens with colleagues from University of Colorado and University of Michigan collected data on kindergarten, first-, and third-grade classroom instructional experiences in a large urban district through direct classroom observations. The goal is to compare instructional practices across grades and across schools within the same district serving students from very different economic backgrounds. Claessens and colleagues are also coding curricular materials to provide new and valuable information about the alignment of mathematics content across the early elementary grades (kindergarten through grade three). Through classroom observations, they will provide insight into the extent to which mathematics instruction in kindergarten varies across schools. By coding three different widely used early mathematics curricula, the team will explore the extent to which instruction is likely to vary depending on the curriculum program that has been adopted. (Funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation)

This two year (2023-2025) grant from the Strada Education Network ($142, 670) is to help support the efforts of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions (CCWT) to train graduate students and post-doctoral researchers in the social sciences on research related to work-based learning and career development.  As part of the National Survey of College Internships (NSCI), CCWT has engaged advanced graduate students in assisting with data analysis, report and research paper writing, dissemination of findings via multiple outlets, and preparation of data visualizations to help share key findings with the community of scholars and practitioners interested in internship research.  In this project CCWT will host an advanced graduate student (i.e., the NSCI Scholar) to focus on analyzing data from the NSCI, and who also will work in collaboration with colleagues from the Strada Education Network to analyze data from the 2023 NSCI and prepare research papers, reports, and presentations on key findings from the work.

This two year (2023-2025) grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($838,959) is to continue funding the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions (CCWT), of which Dr. Hora is the Founding and current co-Director.  This particular grant is intended to help support continued work on the Center’s five core research tools and related programming: a) internships and experiential learning, b) career-related Community Cultural Wealth and social capital, c) BIPOC students’ psychological wellness and career readiness, d) teaching “21st century skills” in college classrooms, and, e) the climate emergency’s impact on career advising and skills-focused instruction – so that they can become available to larger numbers of IHEs.  The project also aims to expand efforts to help institutional practitioners use student-centered data and research-based curricula by enhancing CCWT’s administrative capacities and through an updated dissemination/outreach strategy that adopts a diversified approach to engaging the postsecondary community (e.g., research publications, data dashboards, campus-specific presentations, research symposia, webinars, etc.).

This three year (2019-2022) longitudinal, mixed methods study is funded by the National Science Foundation (DGE # 1920560, $1,489,273) to investigate college internship design, implementation and student outcomes at six Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).  In partnership with the Career Pathways Initiative of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF-CPI), the study builds upon two bodies of literature – the learning experience as a form of situated and experiential learning and developmental processes of racialized vocational identity.

Drawing on surveys of students and interviews with faculty, employers and students over three years, the study conceptualizes the internship experience as being comprised of three elements – participation and access, program design features, and student outcomes and experiences. The research questions are: (1) How, if at all, does internship participation vary by students? demographics, academic programs and performance, and life/employment situations?; (2) What, if any, are the major barriers for students to access and then persist in an internship?; (3) How, if at all, are internship program features associated with students? satisfaction, career-related self-efficacy beliefs, sense of adaptability, and employment outcomes? and (4) How do cultural aspects of HBCU campuses, students’ racial identities, and professional cultures of the disciplines and employers collectively impact student experiences with the internship.

(Co-PI)

Asian American students are often excluded from conversations regarding racialized disparities in STEM. However, when the data on “Asian” subgroups is disaggregated, it is clear that Southeast Asian Americans (i.e., Cambodian, Lao, Vietnamese, and Hmong) are being overlooked and underserved. Despite having one of the lowest high school and undergraduate degree attainment rates in the nation, the struggles of Southeast Asian populations are often erased because of a “model minority stereotype” that views Asian Americans as a uniformly prosperous immigrant community and obscures the reality that Asian Americans deal with structural racism, poverty, and inadequate educational supports. This study expands a research project conducted by University of Wisconsin (UW)–Madison educational researchers and Hmong student activists to investigate the STEM college experiences of Hmong students at the 13 campuses in the UW System. This study cultivates authentic, engaged partnerships with Hmong American students, scholars, and communities, and centers the knowledge and voices of those impacted by systemic racism within STEM pathways. (Drs. Matthew Wolfgram & Bailey Smolarek, Co-directors).

Through the stories of Chinese Americans who grew up and went to school in the Mississippi Delta during Jim Crow, this study explores how Chinese Americans got access to white schools in segregated towns across the Delta, and what they learned about race and being Chinese Americans inside white schools and in other white institutions. How did Chinese Americans in negotiate Jim Crow policies and practices, including school policies and practices? What do their experiences suggest regarding how Asian Americans are racialized? What do their experiences suggest about the boundaries of whiteness?

(supported by Arnold Ventures)

This project quantitatively explores the characteristics, enrollment patterns, and descriptive outcomes of Parent PLUS Loans, including how borrowing varies across student, family, and institutional contexts. In tandem, a sequential mixed-methods design leverages focus groups and interviews to contextualize the experiences of students, parents, and financial aid administrators in the PLUS Loan arena. The project will produce actionable insights for federal policymaking, better inform consumers, and build a foundation for future research.

(supported by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education)

Access to college has become a necessary condition for social and economic mobility. 92% of high-income, suburban high school graduates enroll in college within two years, but only 54% of their lower-income, rural peers do. These disparities fuel a cycle of under-enrollment and under-credentialing that limits the development of already-underserved communities. One challenge is access to information and support. Students in underserved areas lack advisers who can help with important college and career steps. Since 2016-17, Advise TN has done this for 10,000 students across 33 schools and sought to increase college and ACT planning, college applications, financial aid applications and awards, and subsequent college enrollment and completion. Despite the promise of this innovative strategy, little is known about the impacts of programs like it. Through a research-practice partnership, this project will connect researchers with program leaders to comprehensively study Advise TN. Specifically, we ask: Did Advise TN impact students’ (1) college preparation behaviors or high school graduation, (2) college enrollment or degree completion, or (3) workforce outcomes?

Complexity and uncertainty in the college application process contribute to longstanding racial and socioeconomic disparities in enrollment. We leverage a large-scale experiment that combines an early guarantee of college admission with a proactive nudge, fee waiver, and structural application simplification to test the impacts of emerging “direct admissions” policies on students’ college-going behaviors. Students in the intervention were 2.7 percentage points (or 12%) more likely to submit a college application, with larger impacts for racially minoritized, first-generation, and low-income students. Students were most responsive to automatic offers from larger, higher quality institutions on the application margin, but were not more likely to subsequently enroll. In the face of growing adoption, we show this low-cost, low-touch intervention can move the needle on important college-going behaviors but is insufficient alone to increase enrollment given other barriers to access, including the ability to pay for college.

Families’ college savings behaviors are important determinants of students’ postsecondary enrollment and degree attainment. While prior work has examined how economic and sociological aspects of families shape savings behaviors, no study has examined how geographic or community-level factors relate to families’ college savings. Drawing from prior work on the role of place in shaping economic and educational outcomes, our study leverages administrative records on the universe of Pennsylvania 529 account holders and beneficiaries in Pennsylvania (N=197,889) paired with a variety of community-level indicators to descriptively interrogate which geographic features or community influences relate to families’ selection of a college savings plan, their first and mean contributions, and the frequency of savings. Our results suggest there are key community factors that help shape college savings, including socioeconomic status, income inequality, and nonprofit community resources. While these features have been linked to other economic and educational outcomes, our work is the first to document their association with families’ college savings and not only provides policymakers and future researchers with important information on targeting college-going and college-saving resources but also on the salience of place in shaping yet another educational outcome.

Despite recent evidence on the benefits of same-race instructor matching in K-12 and higher education, research has yet to document the incidence of same-race matching in the postsecondary sector. That is, how likely are racially minoritized college students to ever experience an instructor of the same race/ethnicity? Using administrative data from Texas on the universe of community college students, we document the rate of same-race matching overall and across racial groups, the courses in which students are more or less likely to match, the types of instructors students most commonly match to, and descriptive differences in course outcomes across matched and unmatched courses. Understanding each of these measures is critical to conceptualize the mechanisms and outcomes of same-race matching and to drive policy action concerning the diversity of the professoriate.

This project, the seed to a larger study, brings researchers and leaders in multiracial school districts together to develop a research plan based on deliberative approaches to community participation in policymaking and the need to develop school district diversity and enrollment plans that meet the needs for a multiracial democracy. Through this planning we seek to make community-responsive and justice-oriented changes to education through a research-practice partnership that will transform how schools carry out policymaking, how people conceptualize racial justice, and how students are assigned to schools. This project is in collaboration with Alexandra Freidus (University of Connecticut), Adrianna Villavicencio (University of California-Irvine) and Richard Blissett (Center for Democracy and Civic Life, University of Maryland-Baltimore County).

This large-scale study explores the complex processes and outcomes of policy racialization in one school district. I build on three years of ethnographic data that trace the linked stakeholders, discourses and processes involved in constituting policy across three distinctly racialized issues — bilingual education, “gifted” education, and racially disproportionate discipline—and the consequences of these racialization processes for equity. To date, this research has illuminated how a constellation of stakeholders in and out of schools, local enthusiasm for restorative justice, state and federal anti-gun control measures, multi-level budget cuts, racialized poverty and trauma, and a shortage of teachers of color, became bound together through a therapeutic discourse that works with and responds to white supremacy and neoliberalism. This work contributes to theoretical understandings of policy formation as occurring within unique constellations of racial capitalism that extend beyond “the local.” I am currently working on a book project that analyzes and compares the racialized construction and consequences of all three policy issue areas. Taken together, this project will contribute to understanding the different constellations of policymaking around each policy; the convergences and specificities of policy racializations; and the consequences of these for educational equity and democracy. This project has been supported by NAEd/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. The first major analysis from this study, on school resource officer policy, has been published in Race, Ethnicity and Education and reprinted in the book System Failure: The Problem of Policy in the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Routledge Press, Critical Social Thought Series, 2022) and spawned another line of analysis on the racialized political economy undergirding the school-prison nexus. That work, The Politics of the School-Prison Nexus: Racial Capitalism and Possibilities for Transformation in Schools and Beyond, is published in Strengthening Anti-Racist School Leaders (Bloomsbury, 2021).

This project brings together several interlinked analyses of how educators, families, and community based organizations framed educational equity and acted to try to support education for marginalized youth during the 2020-2021 years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. One strand of this work, carried out with Drs. Linn Posey-Maddox and Amy Washbush (UW Madison) partnered with the Madison Metropolitan School District through the Madison Education Partnership (MEP) to better understand how community based organizations and mothers who identified as Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) tried to support BIPOC children’s learning during the first year of the pandemic. Our analysis, soon to be published, identify the many ways mothers supported their children’s learning and through these mother’s stories reveals the notion of “learning loss” as a problematic and limited way to think about what has occurred during this time. A second strand of this work, with Dr. Alexandra Freidus (University of Connecticut), draws on thematic analysis of 300 news and opinion articles related to school reopening debates in New York City in 2020 to examine the competing justice claims that stakeholders, policymakers, district leaders, families, and educators evoked in relation to reopening schools to in-person schooling. In addition to deepening our understanding of the educational politics of the COVID-19 pandemic—an event with field-changing consequences—our analysis offers researchers and policy- makers a more robust basis for advancing equity and conceptualizing just educational policy for multiple stakeholders. This project has spurred theoretical and empirical analyses. Recent empirical findings were published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis in 2023. Finally, a third strand of this work, builds on my work with Alexandra Freidus and work carried out by Dr. Rachel Fish (NYU) to examine questions of equity and family advocacy for disabled students in New York city during the pandemic. The first manuscript from this last strand of work will be published in How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (New York University Press, forthcoming).

This project investigates the raced and classed macro-contexts and consequences of test-based accountability policy through the high-profile case of the 2009 Atlanta test-cheating scandal. It centers the perspectives and experiences of students, families, and community members in disinvested, Black neighborhoods that have been most impacted by high-stakes testing in Atlanta. In centering actors who are marginalized by race and class, the project considers the relevance of macro-contextual analyses of racial capital and the racialized policy consequences that go unrecognized through traditional “top down” policy evaluation perspectives. I have found that pervasive experiences of race and class exploitation and Black educators’ attempts to alleviate systemic inequalities through daily practices of care for students, critically inform study participants’ analyses that test-focused education, unequal school systems, and the mistreatment of Black communities constitute the “real” cheating they experience. This finding provides a corrective to official claims that high-stakes testing is a “colorblind” mechanism of equity and that test-cheating by Black educators is a primary threat to Black students’ learning and wellbeing. Furthermore, while researchers commonly analyze policy outcomes in terms of “achievement gaps,” I am using recent theorizing on suffering to explore the affective costs of high-stakes testing policy and practice. The project has been supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and from UW–Madison.

Drawing on ethnographic and comparative case study methods and critical race theories, the book delves inside two midwestern school districts, chronicling how district leaders attempted to address increasing inequality and diversity while grappling with pressures associated with major economic, political, and demographic shifts confronting school districts across the U.S.. Through the notion of “color-blind managerialism,” the project unearths how and why these two districts–one relatively well off and more progressive, one conservative and more working class–adopt similar, business-inspired policy approaches that do not fully address the inequality and diversity district leaders faced. Indeed, I find that these efforts perpetuate existing inequalities and advance new forms of racism. The project resulted in the award winning book Suddenly Diverse (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and publications in the American Educational Research Journal and the Journal of Education Policy.
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