The educational accountability movement in the United States under No Child Left Behind has negatively affected urban teachers because of high-stakes testing, narrowed curriculum, and scripted pedagogy. Such conditions have led to teacher stress, burnout, and attrition. Missing from the scholarly literature are the ways in which teachers work to…

The lack of achievement of students from high-risk and high-poverty environments necessitates changes in today's middle school environments to create a caring, supportive environment where all middle school students can succeed. This study investigated the classroom learning environments of resilient, average, and nonresilient minority…

The present study revisits a subfield of environmental education: significant life experiences, which studies the influences that shape the development of environmental stewardship. In the present study, we examine the effect of various formative experiences on a group of adults and analyze the role of school, as a formative influence on the…

The possibility is examined that school choice programs could be a means to reducing the achievement gap. Data based on meta-analytic research and the examination of nationwide data sets suggest that school choice programs that include private schools could reduce the achievement gap by 25%. The propounding of this possibility is based on research…

This qualitative study investigated the visions and metaphors for teaching held by teacher candidates enrolled in an urban-based alternative certification program. While late-entry teacher recruits are considered to have high motivations for urban school teaching, few studies explore the nature of these motivations. Findings from this study…

This article addresses the need for novice teachers to receive exposure and experiences related to family engagement as part of their academic preparation to better facilitate their actual parent involvement practices. In a graduate-level parent involvement in education course, early childhood educators had an opportunity to engage in a variety of…

The purpose of this study is to explore the direct, indirect, and total effects of high school sports participation on educational attainment for Black males using the Educational Longitudinal Study (2002/2006), a large, nationally representative, database. A path analysis procedure for determining underlying causal relationships between variables…

Although national trends of urban adolescent reading underachievement suggest that schools are unable to adequately support this population's reading development, some studies have demonstrated that urban schools can operate to raise student achievement, thereby disrupting national trends. In this study, the author investigates one such…

For-profit educational management organizations (EMOs) are a growing phenomenon in public education, and they are an integral part of charter school reform in many states. Research suggests that charter schools operated by for-profit entities may take a more entrepreneurial approach when expanding their operations and thus may be more inclined to…

This article, based on qualitative interviews conducted between 2007-2008 with 12 middle-career educators in the greater Boston area in Massachusetts, details teachers' career and leadership aspirations in a context of educational change. The findings suggest that teachers who presently are in midcareer struggle with the move toward the…

This article describes how schools shape family engagement practices in the context of the New Latino Diaspora. Building on critical scholarship that has called for more culturally appropriate definitions of family engagement, this study seeks to develop a theoretical understanding of how school practices influence immigrant families' access…

Over the past 20 years, there have been numerous calls to reform the practices of school counselors. Some have situated these calls for school counseling reform within the context of urban schooling. This study examined the practices of school counselors in one urban school district, and how those practices aligned with the school district's…

Identifying sources of variation has been used extensively in educational research as a tool to identify potential drives of variances in student achievement. However, prior research predominantly relied on findings from national- or international-level data, and thus their conclusions remain very broad-based. This study contributes new insight by…

Growing up in an inner city environment can inhibit healthy development and have detrimental consequences for children and adolescents such as increased risks for many social and psychological problems. This article explores the role of community arts centers in fostering resilience among youth living in the inner city. A review of the literature…

This article looks at the issue of gifted and talented education from the perspective of public policy. It asserts that the underachievement of gifted children is a national concern, as these children may someday benefit society in ways that are disproportionate to their share of the population. Perhaps more importantly, it concludes that gifted…