Recent census data indicate that student populations in U.S. classrooms continue to become increasingly racially diverse. Despite these changes, many early childhood teachers remain reluctant to teach children about race and racial justice. In this article, I argue that multicultural picture books can and should be used to promote racial awareness…

Over the years, the nation's large urban school districts have consistently learned from the progress of their peer districts across the country. Great City School districts that have embraced the challenge of educating America's urban children have recognized the value of benchmarking their performance and growth against the progress of others.…

When the research team began its qualitative exploration of what and how a cohort of preservice elementary/early childhood teachers' in the University of California, Los Angeles' IMPACT Urban Teacher Residency Program learned, the 12-member team did not anticipate the degree to which preservice teachers would credit peers in their learning. On the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct the extant scholarship on quality in early childhood education and to emphasize the importance of extending the literature to explore the potential influence that a teachers' educational background may have on kindergarten readiness for African American children in urban early learning settings.…

The problem this study addressed was whether an intervention, grounded in Reading Recovery strategies, was as effective when used with struggling readers in small groups as it is in 1:1 instruction. The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to investigate the differences in student performance between students who received small group…

This article begins with an introduction to the concept of urban education. Next, the author addresses the future challenge of long-term and developmental perspective in this field, as contrasted with perspectives held by prekindergarten and preschool professionals in early childhood education. Her hope is that this challenge will be addressed in…

Philadelphia's Out-of-School Time (OST) system has identified K-3rd grade literacy support as the focus of the first phase of its strategic plan, launched in 2017. Research shows that OST programs can have an impact on early literacy skills, and this plan views OST programs as an important "delivery system" for addressing critical needs…

Research on the evaluation of early childhood programs focuses mainly on its outcomes rather than its process with often little attention given to the role that feedback to teachers in pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs plays in the larger cycle of the evaluation process. This article provides a case example of a multiyear evaluation of…

This article reveals inequity as a longitudinal construction involving the cumulation of micro/macroaggressions for children who live in high-poverty communities and attend poorly funded schools. Drawing on critical race theory and empirical research that documents forms of micro/macroaggression, a longitudinal analysis is used to identify forms…

Field of education is associated with herculean task and innate responsibility of escorting societies forward. Across space and time, it has been an unambiguous synthesis that education should precede any progress or change. It helps humans to understand themselves and better their interaction with rest of the society. Hence the field of education…

Teacher education programs in the US, recognizing the mismatch that exists in preschool provision between mostly white teachers and a very diverse intake of young children, have begun to explore ways of raising racial awareness among pre-service teachers, with the aim of improving non-white children's classroom experiences and outcomes. This paper…

In this article, I draw on the ethnographic study of a Universal Pre-Kindergarten class to theorize the functional appeal of conflict that permeates young children's interactions. From a conflict theory perspective, I document how young children negotiate meaning in and with their world as they engage in learning through conflict. While…

The field of publicly funded early childhood education continues to evolve into a discipline in which early educators are expected to teach a more culturally and linguistically diverse student population a standardized set of knowledge and skills so that they can meet policymakers' academic achievement requirements. This creates a range of…

The current study explored the preschool classroom environment as an important context for supporting dual-language learning Latino children's development of emergent literacy skills. The results of the study showed that teachers in Spanish-English bilingual preschool classrooms varied in the way they shared wordless picture books with the…

Theorists have begun to explore the ways in which the narratives our children read influence the democratic ideals we wish to impart. In a nation so stratified along both racial and socioeconomic lines and with a long history of various forms of systemic oppression, this issue is particularly relevant to how children in the most inequitable…