When considering issues of education in the United States of America, the vantage point to understanding inequity in education outcomes changes when the scope of an issue is seen from a systemic perspective compared to individual perspective. Research in public health suggests that childhood adversity is often experienced as a serious threat to a child’s physical or psychological sense of safety and wellbeing. In order to investigate childhood adversity and education over space, theoretical applications and methods focusing on more macro level systemic vantage points were selected for the current study. Addressing the need for more nuanced research on the relationship between ACEs, space and educational outcomes in secondary schools in California, the proposed study contributes by providing a complex database of expanded ACEs definitions, the creation of an ACE composite variable and then linking them to the educational outcomes of public high school students across California’s 58 counties. The primary techniques utilized in analysis focused on geospatial analysis and linear regression. The constructed ACE composite variable was especially suited to the proposed study given that it was explicitly designed to explore the magnitude of accumulated ACE exposure over a geographic area. Results of the study painted a complex relationship between ACEs, space and education, with particularly interesting findings surrounding the difference between more rural/suburban counties compared to their urban counterparts, including important regional differences between north/central counties and southern counties. Implications on how California can follow suit of other states in the nation to standardize, organize and disseminate statewide ACE data and what kind of policy is feasible within the state to combat the negative population effects of ACE exposure on education outcomes are provided.

When the compact manifold $M$ has a Riemannian metric satisfying a suitable curvature condition,

we show that it has many minimal two-spheres of index between $n-2$ and $2n-5$,

using Morse theory for the $\alpha $-energy of Sacks and Uhlenbeck.

The difficulty is controlling bad behavior of a sequence of $\alpha $-energy critical points as $\alpha$ approaches one.

The two bad behaviors which must be controlled are convergence toward a bubble tree

and convergence to a branched cover of a minimal sphere of lower energy.

We prevent these difficulties by making estimates on the index of bubble trees and branched covers.

These estimates require a new curvature condition, $\delta$-controlled half-isotropic curvature.

In order to better understand this new condition,

we study the relationship between metrics with $\delta$-controlled half-isotropic curvature

and metrics satisfying the better studied conditions of pinched sectional curvature and pinched flag curvature.

We are able to get a basically complete picture of the relationship between these three conditions.

If $M$ is simply connected, then $\delta$-controlled half-isotropic curvature implies that $M$ is diffeomorphic to $S^n$.

In this case the constant curvature metric on $S^n$ can be used to compute the low degree $O(3)$-equivariant cohomology of $Map(S^2,S^n)$.

This then implies the existence of $\alpha$-energy critical points of low index for generic metrics with $\delta$-controlled half-isotropic curvature, when $\alpha$ is sufficiently close to one.

Using index estimates to control the bad behavior of these critical points as $\alpha$ approaches 1 allows us to prove the existence of many minimal $S^2$ of low index.

The fact that Latina/o students are losing ground to their non-Latino White peers in four-year college enrollment and bachelor's degree attainment even as Latino college enrollment and graduation rates are at an all time high constitutes a perplexing puzzle. In order to realize the potential "demographic dividend" embedded in the diverse youth population entering the U.S. workforce in the next two decades, it will be critical to fill in the missing pieces of what has been referred to as the Hispanic college puzzle. The current study contributes several new pieces to the puzzle of Latina/o postsecondary attainment. Using a national longitudinal database and structural equation modeling techniques, I investigate the possibility that the degree of alignment, or, alternatively, misalignment, between high school students' postsecondary expectations and their actions taken toward fulfilling those ambitions mediates intergenerational resource transmission. The results demonstrate that the extent to which students with high postsecondary expectations prepare during high school to realize their goals can have a marked influence on the level at which they enroll in college. This is true regardless of whether the student is White or Latino, and irrespective of nativity status among Latino youth. The findings also suggest that there are meaningful differences both between Latino and non-Latino White students, as well as within the Latino youth population across generations, with respect to the availability and convertibility of various types of parent capital--in particular, forms of parent social capital--into higher levels of student alignment and college enrollment. Overall, the results of this research suggest that alignment can serve much like a bridge on the road to college, such that when students are able to align their actions with their college expectations and then fully capitalize on that match, they are more likely to enroll in a four-year institution. However, in order for Latino students to bridge their college expectations to higher levels of enrollment, students and their families must be able to forge the sorts of social connections that can help them access and make use of timely and accurate information and guidance during the college choice and enrollment process.

U.S. Latino parents are often characterized by educators as uninvolved in school and the formal education of their children because they do not value education. While research indicates otherwise, stereotypes still exist among many educators that one reason Latinos do poorly in school is because they do not care. Masked behind stereotypes is the significant variation in levels of parent involvement in education among U.S. Latinos. The literature does not address why parents with similar socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds respond to schools in such distinct ways. This ethnographic case study addresses variation in the involvement of Mexican immigrant mothers by focusing on how some use their cultured capacities to construct strategies of action in the formal education of their children in the United States. The implications for policy and practice include a greater understanding of why some Mexican immigrant parents routinely participate in the school affairs of their children while others with similar characteristics and backgrounds do not; and how institutions, like schools, may have the means to impact the strategies of action chosen by parents through the use of widely disseminated semiotic codes. This study also finds that culture's role in the participation of Mexican immigrant parents could not fully be accounted for in Epstein's (1995, 2001) Six Types of Involvement for Parents. Socializing was identified as a seventh type of involvement that may actually serve as a catalyst for involvement in the other six types and a means for strengthening home-school connections. In addition, a significant finding not seen elsewhere in the literature was an overwhelming amount of evidence that the majority of Mexican immigrant mothers in this study believed that schools were better in Mexico than the U.S.

A direct democracy initiative that placed restrictions on bilingual education was codified into the California Education Code by the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998. This initiative attempted to address the problem of educating the current 1.4 million English learners enrolled in public schools who continue to lag behind native-English-speaking students academically (California Department of Education, 2013; Umansky & Reardon, 2014). This study focused on policy entrepreneurs in relation to Proposition 227 – both proponents and opponents of the Proposition – and the political strategies they employed to garner support for their preferred policies via the mass media. Research shows the attention newspapers give to education, including language education policy, can influence the education of immigrant students and ELs (Wright, 2005).

The methodological approach employed to study the political language used by policy entrepreneurs, interpretive policy analysis, and the guiding conceptual framework, political spectacle, aligned well to help uncover and understand the generation of meaning(s) by policy entrepreneurs and media around Proposition 227. Political spectacle is constructed via the language and images the media use when presenting political views and often serves to distort public policies and maintain the status quo (Edelman, 1988). An in-depth media study was conducted that included data from California newspapers covering three regions across the state and videos downloaded from a popular social media site. Findings revealed spectacle around Proposition 227 including the use of symbolic language to depict bilingual education as a failure, the casting of immigrant students as objects, and the enactment of dramatic actions that benefited the policy entrepreneurs rather than the immigrant students. The study also revealed Proposition 227 to exemplify the joining of three streams – problem, policy, and political – which opened a window through which the authors of Proposition 227 were able to push their policy (Kingdon, 1995). The study suggests that attending to the political language used by policy entrepreneurs can shed light on the political strategies that work to convey influential policy messages via the media. This insight should aid in the development of more effective and equitable language education policies in the future.

Students in the United States are highly mobile. Previous research has shown that the majority of students in the United States change schools between grades 1 and 12 for reasons other than promotion from one level to another (e.g., elementary to middle school.). Research also has found that student mobility is generally detrimental to student achievement. Despite this evidence, the issue of student mobility has not received much attention from educational researchers, practitioners, or policy makers.

In this report we examine student mobility among California Latino adolescents. Student mobility may be especially important in California because of its highly mobile population. Latinos are the largest and fastest growing segment of the state population. According to California Department of Finance estimates, the Latino public-school population is projected to triple in size between 1986 and 2006, while the non-Latino public-school population is projected to decrease (see Figure 1.1). Consequently, if student mobility can be problematic for both students and schools, as previous research suggest, it is especially important to understand the nature of mobility among the Latino population.

Using longitudinal data on two samples of California students—the first a group of 8th grade students who were surveyed over a sex-year period from 1988 to 1994; and the second a group of low-income, urban Latino 7th grade students who were first studied over a six-year period from 1990 to 1996—this study examined the incidence, causes, and consequences of student mobility, particularly during high school. Throughout this study we examine differences between Latino and non-Latino white students, as well as differences among Latino students. Here we summarize some of the major findings of this study.