Rudy Ruiz and Faith Connolly propose a new accountability measure that captures the percentage of students in a school that have a teacher of a similar ethno-racial background. The measure would hold school districts accountable for the percentage of students who have a teacher who looks like them. Adding this measure would bring attention to…

The Along digital SEL product marketed to teachers by Gradient Learning and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) promises to help teachers establish strong relationships with their students via an exchange of personal reflections. In so doing, it collects intimate personal information from students about their lives. Faith Boninger and Alex Molnar…

A school-focused commercializing process over 100 years in the making has been turbo-charged by the rise of data-collecting digital educational platforms and a pandemic that has forced widespread use of distance learning. Alex Molnar and Faith Boninger explain how advertising to students creates what John Dewey would call "mis-educative…

As community schools spread across the country, community school staff need effective approaches to engaging families and community-based partners. Such principles must be broadly applicable, given community schools' mandate to adapt to different local contexts. Based on recent research on Baltimore City's community schools, the authors highlight…

This paper examines the roles that faith and vocation play in teaching. Faith can lead to a sense of calling that impacts the identity and integrity of the teacher, which, in turn, influences the holistic development of students. Therefore, teachers of faith who respect the limits of religious belief in public schools are essential contributors to…

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation has created a program that enables students to learn directly with, from, and about one another's culture, religion and beliefs. Face to Faith is a state-of-the-art educational program that addresses cross-cultural and inter-religious understanding in the context of study about global issues. The program uses…

Even though public schools maintain a separation between church and state, non-Christians face social and logistical challenges that threaten their development and academic performance. The challenges may be inadvertent or intentional, observable or discreet, or introduced by students, educators, school policies, or broader society. Educators have…

Teacher education should provide opportunities for preservice teachers to think about the intersection of their faith and their practice. Students with a high degree of theological certainty may shut down those conversations and therefore deny themselves and their classmates opportunities to wrestle with questions related to their religious…

How educators, school board members, taxpayers, voters, parents, and students design a school calendar, in terms of both process and product, should be a reflection of how we desire to accommodate and conform diverse faiths within our communities. If, according to Dewey, the school is a reflection of society, then what does the inability to…

Despite a continuing stream of concern on the part of researchers, demographers, and cultural pundits about a crisis in boys' social development and schooling, surprisingly little attention has been paid to what is perhaps the richest pool of data: current, observable teaching practices that clearly work with boys. In schools of all types in all…

Civic education began wandering in the curricular wilderness in the 1960s, when Vietnam and then Watergate brought disenchantment, rebellion, experimentation, a loss of faith in traditional institutions and traditional leaders, the breakup of consensus, the weakening of the core culture and ultimately the erosion of curricular requirements in…