Unlocking Opportunity for African American Girls: A Call to Action for Educational Equity

This report seeks to expand conversations around educational opportunity by taking a comprehensive look at the barriers African American girls face and the educational and economic outcomes that result. One important barrier is the prevalence of stereotypes that adversely impact the educational experiences of African American girls. Structural and institutional barriers examined in this report -- such as under-resourced schools, disparate discipline practices, gender-based violence and harassment, and lack of support for pregnant and parenting students -- further compromise educational outcomes for African American girls. This report fills an important gap in existing data on educational achievement and its attendant economic consequences. Although there is plentiful data on American children and education, the lack of data broken down by race and gender together has fueled the assumption that all girls are doing fine in school. But in fact, although girls overall graduate from high school at higher rates than boys, girls of color are graduating at far lower rates than white girls and boys. In almost all states with available data, the high school graduation rate for African American girls is below the national average for girls overall, resulting in severe economic consequences for African American women and their families

An Enhanced Artificial Neural Network Approach To Predict Student Dropout From Imbalanced Datasets

School dropout has profound and long-term impacts on global development. Machine Learning (ML) techniques have been used to create models to predict school dropouts, supporting school managers, educators, and policymakers to take proactive measures to reduce those rates and their social impact. However, most studies did not account for the imbalance of historical datasets when training those models, leading to over-optimistic performance metrics and poor practical results. In the present work, a novel ANN approach able to deal with imbalanced datasets to predict school dropout is proposed and tested with actual data, reaching the remarkable performance of correctly predicting 90.1% of the students who would dropout and outperforming the benchmark

Education in the Post-Lake View Era: What Is Arkansas Doing to Close the Achievement Gap?

Assesses whether the state's reforms can close the achievement gap among racial and socioeconomic groups. Proposes additional steps such as school health programs, extended learning programs, targeted small classes, and more parental engagement

Open and Distance Learning for Basic Education in South Asia: its potential for hard-to-reach children and children in conflict and disaster areas: Bangladesh and Sri Lanka Country Studies

These are the country studies for the UNICEF funded project which explores the ways in which, in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka various forms of open and distance learning could be developed to better meet the needs of marginalised children and those affected by natural disaster (Bangladesh) and by conflict (Sri Lanka)