The article is about the early phase of implementation of a New York state testing policy in two academic departments in an urban, comprehensive high school. It describes and analyzes a high school?s failure to construct a coherent internal accountability system when encountering an external high-stakes testing policy. Drawing on interviews with…

In this piece, the author argues that service-learning has been overly defined and because of that, it is in danger of becoming meaningless. He further argues that one way to recover service-learning from the wasteland of definition-making and thereby improve both its understanding and practice is by applying philosophical inquiry to the various…

The learning process is forever riddled with controversies. Principal among them is that many students leave the classroom with the feeling that the odds are stocked against them, or that teachers bear grudges that are often used to malign their work or progress. But if the main focus in this teacher-student function is to make students realize…

Assessing students' knowledge has always been a difficult task, especially in today's climate of standards driven curriculum. Challenges to educators include meeting content standards, assessing students' progress and focusing on diverse learning styles, as well as preparing students for work and life beyond schools. To meet these challenges,…

High school students who change their class schedules after the start of the school year may miss class time before their schedules are finalized. This loss of class time is expected to lead to a loss of learning opportunities, and thus to lower student achievement. We examine a school with an unexpectedly large number of such schedule changes.…

Although the use of action research has made its way into various faculties of education as a means of applying theory to practice, there remains a disconnect between the teacher as an educator and the teacher as a researcher. Research must be empirically based; therefore, it has traditionally been seen to reside in the domain of the theorist or…

The mathematics success of African American male adolescents has been given limited attention. Most often, African American males are viewed in terms of their failure as opposed to their success. This tendency to focus almost exclusively on African American failure is a debilitating feature of extant literature and it constrains our understanding…

The introduction of the No Child Left Behind has brought renewed national attention to the persistence of achievement gaps in education and, in particularly, has challenged the mathematics education community to revisit its long stated commitment to removing achievement disparities in school mathematics. Longstanding equity messages in…

The purpose of this article is to outline a framework that can be used to examine issues of equity and mathematics reform. Adapted from an opportunity-to-learn framework proposed by Tate (2004), this model includes factors related to time, quality, and design. This framework is applied to the cases of two secondary mathematics teachers to…

The paper presents the guiding ideas behind our culturally responsive approach to teacher professional development and an overview of how those tenets inform, tacitly and directly, our efforts to realize the promise of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' five Process Standards. A review of the primary obstacles teachers face in…

The author of this article contends that the U.S. government, in conjunction with public and private sectors, are failing American society by failing the vast majority of America's urban youth. This failure is seen in America's public inner city schools where the numbers of students graduating from high school vs. the number of students…

In this paper, the author argues that current notions of citizenship do not fully reflect the reality of increasing transnational migration and diversity within the United States. Under the rhetoric of national unity and security, transnational migrants are often treated as foreigners, outsiders, or even in some cases positioned on the opposite…

Although criticized by many, the Boston Public (BP) television show raises important issues about the realities of high school life. At a time when educational policy makers see a need to improve student test scores, this show suggests that other issues are more important in the lives of modern high school students, teachers, and administrators.…

To improve achievement among African American students, education professionals must pay special attention to African American male achievement and reframe the academic achievement gap as a treatment gap. Engagement studies suggest that African American students, and African American boys in particular, are susceptible to academic disengagement.…

The racially tinged Confederate flag debate in South Carolina is viewed as a signifier of more popular struggles over the representation of "southern heritage" and under girds the social studies unit described in this paper. The unit was designed to teach the curriculum from a popular cultural, issues-oriented perspective using critical…