Research focused on student belonging has used available measures largely in a unidimensional way without adequate attention to the psychometric properties of these data. This study introduces a new measure of school belonging that is psychometrically robust with preliminary evidence of construct validity called the Simple School Belonging Scale (SSBS).

Value-added estimates of teacher quality are attempts to determine to what degree a teacher theoretically would contribute, on average, to the test score gains of any student in the accountability population (i.e., district or state). The authors suggest an alternative statistical methodology, propensity score matching, which allows estimation of how well a teacher performed relative only to the students similar to those actually assigned to that teacher. This approach more closely fits the appropriate role of an accountability system—to estimate how well an employee performed in the job actually assigned. It also has the benefit of requiring fewer statistical assumptions—assumptions that are frequently violated in value-added modeling.

Scholars who work with Latino/as in the USA have long been calling for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of the US-based Latino population. Two-way Immersion (TWI) bilingual education programmes are an interesting context in which to examine the Latino parent communities in the USA. Overall, the language enrichment nature of TWI programmes attracts diverse parents from across many different demographic groups, and for a variety of reasons. This study uses an innovative application of cluster analysis to examine the parent population at one TWI Spanish–English elementary school. Survey questions asked were: parents’ income, educational achievement, ethnicity, language spoken at home, religious affiliation, country of origin and residential distance from the school. Our analyses reveal that parents in our sample can be classified into four distinct groups based on the combinations of included characteristics. Our analyses show the emergence of three Latino parent clusters and one Caucasian parent cluster. These analyses show how accounting for the different social dimensions of these parents’ lives simultaneously can provide a more nuanced understanding of the Latino parents at this school.

This research article examines parent motivations for enrolling their children at the Dual Immersion Academy, a charter school in Salt Lake City that is implementing a school-wide Spanish-English two-way immersion program. Parent motives were assessed in a parent survey sent home to parents in the fall of 2007, 2008 and 2009 (N= approx 200 parents). Surveys revealed parent motivations to include bilingualism and biliteracy, heritage language maintenance, heritage culture maintenance, and convenience (the fact that it is a neighborhood school). Critical findings point to how these motives varied by demographic characteristics of the parents, including ethnicity, socio-economic status and distance of home from the school. These trends reveal the heterogeneous parent community at DIA and shed light on parent expectations and conceptualizations of the school, with implications for parental involvement strategies.

This study describes how 72 fifth grade Latina/Latino students express their sense of belonging to their ethnic group. The purpose of this study is to help teachers gain specific understanding of the ways that preadolescent Latina/Latino students express belonging to their ethnic group, in order to become more effective at implementing culturally relevant and inclusive pedagogy. Students in this study spoke in concrete and descriptive ways about ethnic food, their language and their families when asked about the ?ethnic things? in their lives. Findings from this study underscore the importance of listening for expressions of ethnicity among pre-adolescents in order to better support ethnic identity development, as well as school and family connections, for ethnic minority students at the crucial age of transition.