A death within a school is a traumatic event that touches everyone in the school community. How teachers, students, and administrators respond to loss has ongoing implications for the adaptation of all involved. Therapists Colin Pereira-Webber and Evelina Pereira-Webber explore the topic of loss within a school through a written dialogue. Drawing…

We examine whether the "acting white" labeling practice and subsequent peer isolation exist (or do not exist) within Somali immigrant adolescents, one of the most underresearched black immigrant student groups, and what school contexts are associated with their presence (or absence). Using a case study, we found that high-achieving…

In this autobiographical narrative, the author recounts her experiences teaching the novel "Always Running" by Luis Rodriguez with her English classes at a high school in a gang-heavy area. When she first started teaching, this teacher struggled to engage students. One particularly disruptive student requested to read "Always…

In the spring of 2014, Chicago educators met to reflect on the opportunities and challenges for progressive, democratic education in Chicago-area schools. This article weaves together the writings of teachers and principals from over 15 public schools and a couple of private and parochial schools who are thinking about their own experiences in…

By examining the potential of purposefully implemented critical bicultural pedagogy (CBP) for student empowerment, this article responds to "Culture and Power in the Classroom: Educational Foundations for the Schooling of Bicultural Students" by Antonia Darder (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012). Using a theoretical framework based upon…

The article examines the enactment of culturally relevant progressivism on the part of the principal of the Social Justice School, a small urban public high school explicitly committed to democratic education. Drawing upon extensive interviews and field observations conducted over the course of an academic year by a teacher-researcher within the…

American educators are expected to be partners in the rearing of our children, with crucial roles in children's intellectual and moral development both. We therefore must find thoughtfully balanced ways of assessing school performance and engineering school reform. In this essay, a high school principal reflects on recent accountability reforms in…

Charter school administrators weathered start-up woes, among them challenging students with unmet needs, verbal assaults, dwindling student enrollment, and a first-year budget deficit exceeding $200,000 to implement a reading improvement strategy that holds promise for helping at-risk students read better, a point particularly underscored…

As part of the Small Schools movement in Chicago Public Schools, a high school dedicated to African-centered education was chartered. The virtues of Ma'at and the Nguzo Saba, otherwise known as the seven principles of Kwanza, were the foundational principles of the school and were to be integrated into all of the practices and policies of the…

This essay is an open letter from a classroom teacher to a concerned citizen. The letter lists a variety of problems caused largely by standardization and the more corrosive effects of positivism. Many of these problems are unknown to those outside the immediate school setting. While the letter focuses on a specific setting, an inner city school…

Given the way that student, teacher, principal, and school testing and accountability measures are currently leaning, it is understandable why a child's moral development sometimes gets less attention than her aptitude in algebra. Yet even with nearly all major accountability incentives heaped upon the tests in math and English, there are still…

As zero tolerance policies and retributive disciplinary codes proliferate among public schools throughout the country, this essay reflects upon one school's nontraditional model of school "discipline" as an alternative to such punitive policies. In particular, this essay explores the fairness committee at Humanities Preparatory Academy in New York…

Earlier essays in this symposium describe Restorative Justice processes in schools, referred to in our school as a Fairness Committee. Implementing these collaborative, restorative processes does not come without challenges. This essay will explore some of the historical and theoretical roots of the Fairness Committee in Lawrence Kohlberg's work…

Exile has its place. As an age-old human response to conflict, its potential value to the healthy maturation of students and the school community should not be discounted. Exile or ostracism goes by various names in school. Students are told: Move your desk. Leave the classroom and wait in the hall. Go to the office. Go to detention. You're…

This article shows the process through which one teacher and a group of eleventh-graders worked to create spaces for democratic education in a hierarchically organized New York City public school that is heralded as a model of success under current reform initiatives. In response to student resistance to a required unit on Tim O'Brien's novel, The…