This paper focuses on the implementation of Proposition 227 and its impact on the education of English learners in California's K-12 public schools since its passage in 1998. The paper begins with an examination of the sociopolitical context surrounding the proposition and its implementation. The implementation of the new law is then…

The author, a teacher-activist with Teacher Action Group-Philadelphia (TAG), presents her views on the need for teachers to get involved in the battle for public education. She expresses her concerns about the political games being played to advance a neoliberal agenda that seeks to dispossess students of their right to a quality education and…

Teachers are natural problem solvers, and they should be using this quality to their advantage when it comes to solving the systemic issues that plague Philadelphia's education system. Many of the articles in this issue have already gone into great detail about what is happening in Philadelphia. Torch Lytle has provided a summary of the…

Information about the MIT Media Lab PLATFORM, a Summit of Innovators, is presented. This Summit was comprised of engineers, computer scientists, coders, activists, designers, and technology wizards, a gathering of people of color who have been remarkably successful, provocative, and creative against the odds. The event enabled the author and other…

Philadelphia has a rich history of high school student activism, stretching back to 1967, when 3,500 Philadelphia students walked out of their schools, marched to the Board of Education, and demanded the addition of black history courses taught by black teachers, the removal of police from high schools, and an increase in the hiring of black…

Dr. James Lytle's discussion of the "destruction" of the School District of Philadelphia was indeed a bitter pill for Indi Ekanayake to swallow. As an educator who is both an alumnus of Teach For America and a charter school employee, Ekanayake feels as if he might be a representative of the types of people whom Dr. Lytle is…

This article presents the author's views about the school district deconstruction in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He discusses his 30-year experience as a principal and central office administrator with the School District of Philadelphia and his involvement in the efforts to lead urban school reform in the country. He also describes the…

Urban districts throughout the nation are contending with declining enrollment, aging facilities in disrepair, persistently low student achievement, increased competition with charters, and severe fiscal constraints. Philadelphia is a case in point. Over the past year, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) was forced to borrow $304 million…

This collaborative inquiry examines the ways new teachers are being prepared as critical reflective practitioners in three urban teacher education programs. Researching individually and collectively, the research team analyzes and compares pedagogical methods and program features for preparing new teachers for urban schools. Their findings detail…

In recent years, researchers have called into question the efficacy of prescribed commercial curricula in early childhood classrooms (Genishi & Dyson, 2009). Despite these concerns, federally funded initiatives and such findings as those presented in the Report of the National Early Literacy Panel continue to promote scientifically based reading…

Education policy makers have long searched for a system that will recognize and reward outstanding practice, support educators to improve their performance, and, most importantly, increase student achievement. For states and school districts to secure grants from the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) Fund, President Barack Obama is requiring…

It was spring of 2004 when Joe Cytrynbaum interviewed to become the Program Director at Umoja Student Development Corporation in Chicago. Umoja is a weird hybrid of a youth development/educational reform organization. The organization operates from the premise that all sustainable change (for individuals and systems) has to happen in the context…

There exist many actors within the realm of education policy planning and implementation, namely: the policy makers; the national, local and regional institutions engaged in the dissemination and interpretation of these policies; and the educational institutions that implement these policies at the ground level (schools). While schools are largely…

This paper explores the role of home-school conflicts in the educational failure of children of Latin American immigrants and examines how these conflicts have been framed and understood in the existing research literature. It argues that structural analyses of barriers to educational attainment alone fail to capture the multiplicity of forces…

This article explores issues surrounding teaching for social justice in urban schools. Using qualitative methods, our study examined the ways in which seven urban teachers used culturally relevant pedagogy as a mechanism for teaching for social justice. We found that by adhering to the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy (e.g. personal…