Merit promotion policies that require students to post passing scores on standardized tests or be retained in grade have become widespread. In this study, the author used a cultural sociological perspective to examine how teachers and students at two urban high schools enacted a district-wide merit promotion policy. Findings indicate that rather…

This article reports findings from a study exploring the roles of peer influences in cultivating urban high school students' academic success in mathematics. While the literature describing family/school influences on the academic achievement of students of color is compelling, much of it suggests that urban students' peer groups do not support…

Chinese Americans' high levels of educational achievement have earned them attention as a "model minority" to be emulated by underachieving and underrepresented minority groups. However, the model minority analogy does not adequately explain how this achievement is realized, nor how such information can be used to help other groups close the…

Through a critical interpretivist frame, the authors use ethnography and archives to examine themes associated with society's ongoing denial of literate citizenship for people with perceived intellectual disabilities. They link this denial to the experiences of other devalued and marginalized groups to challenge the common perception that…

This study examined the level and impact of five types of parent involvement on elementary school children's academic achievement by race/ethnicity, poverty, and parent educational attainment. The sample comprised 415 third through fifth graders who completed the Elementary School Success Profile. Hypotheses from Bourdieu's theory of cultural…

Proponents of school restructuring often promote the purported benefits of professional forms of management that call for staff cooperation and collegiality, teachers' participation in school decision making, and supportive leadership by school principals. A theoretical perspective on organizations known as contingency theory refers to such…

Anchored in the narrative inquiry tradition, this article examines commonly held beliefs about curriculum dissemination from the perspective of a teacher whose campus participated in a major school reform initiative. Through the presentation of a constellation of fine-grained stories revolving around the teacher's curriculum making as an art…

Policy problems do not exist as social fact awaiting discovery. Rather, they are constructed as policymakers and constituents interpret a particular aspect of the social world as problematic. How a policy problem is framed is important because it assigns responsibility and creates rationales that authorize some policy solutions and not others.…

Interviews with 40 recently tenured university professors indicated that scholarly work is emotional in content; it draws on scholars' emotional resources. Yet, discourse about scholarship's personal and emotional meanings is uncommon, given historic separations (reified in university policy) between emotional and cognitive work and between…

Researchers have been challenged to go beyond socioeconomic status in the search for school-level characteristics that make a difference in student achievement. The purpose of the present study was to identify a new construct, academic optimism, and then use it to explain student achievement while controlling for socioeconomic status, previous…

To illuminate the processes of creating learning communities, this study investigated the social context of an inclusion classroom by examining (a) how teachers established a community ethos, (b) how students responded with regard to the positioning of students with disabilities, and (c) how macro discourses possibly shaped interactional…

This longitudinal study examined the PRAXIS I experiences of African American and Latino undergraduates seeking admission into teacher education at a Big Ten university. Participants were 44 students selected from a larger sample enrolled in a recruitment and support program aimed at members of underrepresented minority groups. The theoretical…

Researchers have given limited attention to teacher attitudes toward inclusion of English-language learners (ELLs) in mainstream classrooms. The author explored 4 categories within secondary teacher attitudes toward ELL inclusion: (a) ELL inclusion, (b) coursework modification for ELLS, (c) professional development for working with ELLs, and (d)…

The authors explored test-preparation and test-taking strategies that high school students used in algebra tests. From a pool of high school students (N = 156), 61 students participated in interviews, and of those interviewed, 26 represented those who were high achieving as well as highly interested in mathematics (n = 15) vs. those who were low…

The authors examined the use of the elaborative interrogation (EI) strategy with a lengthy text in a technology-enhanced environment. As commonly found in traditional and online text materials, questions appeared in the right margins of the text. Seventy-five randomly assigned volunteers in 2 conditions read instructional materials delivered by…