This article examines the westward imposition of specific kinds of land use by focusing on the Harmony Society's transformation of Posey County, Indiana. The German pietistic society carried their vision of proper land use from Europe to Pennsylvania and, in 1814, to what was then considered the West: Indiana Territory. During their decade in…

This research evaluated the psychometric properties of Friedman's (1999) Teacher Work-Autonomy Scale (TWA) to determine whether it was an acceptable instrument to measure U.S. teacher autonomy in the present educational context. A second purpose was to ascertain the current status of teachers' perceptions of their autonomy from a sample…

Faculty members in teacher and administrator preparation programs have unprecedented opportunities to incorporate advanced technologies, including the expansion of online classes and the use of online discussion forums. Within online environments, the concepts of critical pedagogy are more connected to the landscape of digital information,…

Because social technologies present illuminating educational, ethical, economic, and structural challenges to existing constructions of public education, they catalyze a fundamental examination of what public education should look like and be like in a democracy. Given their performances in other arenas, mobile and electronic technologies have the…

This article seeks to characterize Teach For America's (TFA) theoretical framework as engendering disillusionment among its corps members. Given that the corps members have little to no pedagogical or methods training prior to taking on teaching positions through TFA, the lessons learned during the summer training set the stage for the…

Using a critical ethnographic perspective, I describe how social scientists actively transition into the evaluation industry in a reform environment that is marked by increased privatization of all aspects of public education. I do this by exploring adaptations that contract evaluators use to enhance a sense of personal connection to their work…

Drawing on a year-long qualitative study, this article examines how one refugee student from the Vietnamese Central Highlands negotiated social and cultural constructions of patriotism and citizenship in a Junior Reserves Officer Training Corps (JROTC) class at an urban high school. Data are analyzed using Butler's (1990) the theory of…

Despite numerous reform efforts, schools have not achieved equitable academic outcomes for all students. To better identify where schools have failed, research has sought to understand the complex role the school environment plays in mediating academic success, particularly for students of color. In this article, we forward the concept of…

Within the state selected for this study, teacher preparation programs and state certification criterion require that educators examine the relationship between school and society within social foundations of education (SFE) coursework. Using observations and interviews, this study examines to what extent four experienced, urban classroom teachers…

This article offers a quantitative analysis of the growth of for-profit provision of teacher education in the United States. Data from all Title-IV-aid-participating institutions from 1996 to 2008 is analyzed to provide a comprehensive overview of the relative changes in enrollments of education majors at public, not-for-profit, and for-profit…

This study examines how and why peoples of African descent access and utilize community-based pedagogical spaces that exist outside schools. Employing a theoretical framework that fuses historical methodology and border-crossing theory, the researchers review existing scholarship and primary documents to present an historical examination of how…

Upon its publication in 1976, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis' "Schooling in Capitalist America" was the most sophisticated and nuanced Marxian social and political analysis of schooling in the United States. Thirty-five years after its publication, "Schooling" continues to have a strong impact on thinking about education. Despite its…

Participants in this study were ethnic Hungarian secondary students attending high schools in Romania in which Hungarian was the primary language of instruction. Attitudes of participants toward ethnic and cultural groups were measured using a variation of the Bogardus (1933) Scale of Social Distance. Results were consistent with predictions based…

Through listening to the voices of students, educators and community members can begin to reconstruct the culture of urban schools that are often full of stories about student deficits, genetic explanations about achievement, and cultural mismatch theories that may be traced to historical and sociological ideologies. The purpose of this heuristic…

Framed by theoretical perspectives on Black Feminist Thought, the life course, and the Generation X/Hip-Hop generation, I present findings from a subset of 10 Black women educators in Birmingham, Alabama who participated in a larger life story project. The participants, who came of age professionally across the pre- and post-civil rights movement…