As a response to the attacks on ethnic studies in Arizona and the move to ban certain books, this essay presents theoretical and pedagogical reflections from two professors and addresses the ways teacher preparation programs can offer a resistance. Based on the authors' experience in teacher preparation programs, one in the humanities and the…

The appropriateness of using statistical data to inform the design of any given service development or initiative often depends upon judgements regarding scale. Large-scale data sets, perhaps national in scope, whilst potentially important in informing the design, implementation and roll-out of experimental initiatives, will often remain unused…

In the context of talk about changing their lives, incarcerated young men and their supervisors talk about faith as a force for positive change. Given the historical and contemporary significance of religion as a locus of organizing and collective struggle, I argue that faith represents a potential asset in efforts to assist incarcerated young…

We review our involvement in social justice movements and projects over the past half-century that led to our understanding of importance of democracy. We contrast our understanding based on our extensive involvement in schools, our record of accomplishments from national and state legislation. e.g., "New Careers" projects, task forces in…

Drawing on data collected during the second year of a longitudinal qualitative study that followed over 10 Latino/a bilingual students, this article foregrounds the experiences of participants during their sixth-grade year. The principle data sources included structured and unstructured interviews with teachers and students, school observations,…

Believing that accountability could be a vehicle for change, the California Department of Education (CDE) requires all high school students to pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) in order to graduate. In doing so, California joins many others states in mandating a high school exit exam as a current or future requirement for…

In this article, I examine the role of teacher racial identity on teaching strategy and the treatment of race in classroom discussions. I explicate how the pattern of minimizing the negative racial comments made to English language learners played out in participants' teaching and how it is reflective of socially constructed notions of race and…

This paper describes a youth-centered activist project with a group of young women in Brooklyn, NY, and the controversy surrounding it. In 1999 the young women created a neighborhood mural with anti-violence themes. Within 6 months of the mural's dedication, the mural was whitewashed by the corporate owner of the mural wall. Using content and…

In this paper, I offer my own counterstory of matriculating through a teacher education program as an African American student on a predominately White campus as a reference point for thinking through how racism operates through teacher education's dominant discourse and practice of teacher reflection. It is an important story to tell primarily…

This article presents data from an ethnographic study focused on the school engagement of Puerto Rican girls. I explore the school engagement of Puerto Rican girls through the metaphor of "passing". The findings demonstrate that despite variation between individual girls in academic achievement, all of the girls in the study suffered negative…

National narratives on the movement to desegregate Southern schools, as construed by dominant cultural forces, focus on school desegregation from the vantage point of dominant culture; portraying school desegregation as a singular and inevitable event emanating from jurisprudence and principles of democracy, with little attention to the…

Critical educational researchers in the United States and elsewhere are missing something essential in their inattention to considerable support among Black urban women for market-based educational reforms, including vouchers. While the educational left has engaged in important empirical and theoretical work demonstrating the particularly negative…

"Brown v. Board of Education" was focused on eliminating racial stigma and creating greater racial equity in education. Unfortunately, racial and ethnic stigma is still a powerful force in educational institutions of all kind. In this manuscript, I review the ways that stigma impedes academic performance, shapes the classroom climate and…

I use this paper to reexamine my role as a White researcher on a multiracial research team. I reanalyze data I collected during an evaluation project to reveal how I avoided seeing race in the schools I visited and how I dodged discussions of race with members of those school communities. By analyzing my own discursive practice, I introduce a…

In this article I argue that the current high-stakes testing accountability model is an assistencialist model, derived from deficit thinking paradigms. Such models, like the No Child Left Behind Act, sanction low performance with serious consequences for students and educators. Drawing from Freire, I propose an anti-assistencialist accountability…