In today's urban schools, foreign-born children and children of immigrants are the fastest growing sector of the student population and as a result of this changing demographic, our schools are more ethnically, racially and religiously diverse than they have ever been (Suárez-Orozco et al. in "Thriving and spirituality among youth:…

Reform efforts like the urban, arts-based initiative Project ARTS are designed to provide intentional, equitable methods of improving students' learning, yet few urban educators have been sufficiently trained to recognize differences in habitus between themselves and their students. For equitable reform to occur teachers must understand their…

This article examines the ways that the charter school movement is experienced and negotiated by educators who entered the profession through Teach For America (TFA). TFA's impact has been significant in the larger educational trend towards market-based reforms and, in particular, the charter school movement. Analyzed through a critical…

Although a growing body of literature is produced on reform of urban school districts, few studies examine shifts in the culture of managers resulting from reorganization in these bureaucracies. This article engages an analysis of central office managerial culture in the New York City Department of Education during a culminating moment of district…

This article, written by three research-active teachers with the support of their academic partner, interrogates the achievement-attendance link in the most recent government quantitative data for secondary schools in England: persistent absentees stands at 6.6% for all children, but it raises to 9% for students who are classed as "Pupil…

This article, written by a team of research-active teachers who are also senior leaders in a large, urban, comprehensive high school in the North of England, reports on their joint teacher inquiry project. This work has school-wide significance, given recent history, progressing from being graded as a "failing" school by the Office for…

This article is co-authored by two urban school Heads in the north of England with the support of an academic partner. The article begins with the phenomenon of official judgements of urban schools, made by the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, a semi-privatised and supposedly independent arm of government.…

Educational leaders attempting to enact equity-focused change in their schools are frequently met with fierce opposition by politically powerful parents whose children are well served by the status quo. The purpose of this conceptual article is to: (a) explore the utility of "Critical Race Theory" as a framework for helping K-12 school…

Since a major purpose of critical pedagogy is to change society by changing schools, critical pedagogy must gain an increased presence within K-12 schools. For this to happen, however, critical educators must begin to more fully recognize and appreciate the structural obstacles that schools present to critical educational change. This paper…

Over the past several decades, policymakers have sought to address the problem of school failure by exposing traditional public schools to competitive market forces. In this analysis, we examine how two traditional public schools in a "high pressure/high choice" urban school cluster in Texas responded to a number of overlapping choice policies…

High schools throughout the United States experience problems with violence, drugs, and crime. School administrators have responded with policies and strategies designed to prevent school violence such as zero tolerance approaches, partnerships with law enforcement agencies, security camera installations, and hiring additional security personnel…

This article theoretically examines the meaning and function of hate speech in a high-security juvenile male prison school. Specifically, the article draws on data from an ethnographic study of this prison school site in order to map the institutional mechanisms of hate speech. Additionally, the article suggests these mechanisms are not anomalous…

The author uses geospatial analysis to examine the "educational opportunity spaces" of two adjacent urban neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Organizing insights are gathered from Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological perspectives on human development, which posit that students are significantly impacted by multiple environmental…

How teachers "care" for students is a well-established line of inquiry in educational research, but the ways such "care" may function as symbolic violence have received scant attention. In this ethnographic investigation of classroom disciplinary interactions, the characteristics and functions of preservice teachers' care discourses are examined.…

This study seeks to understand community member participation in and influence over an urban school district's school closure process. Data from interviews with School Board members, district administrators, and community members, as well as district documents and newspaper articles suggest that district administrators limited participation…