Desegregation in the south had many goals, among them was creating equitable opportunities for students in schools. Much of the literature on desegregation efforts are focused on general education and little research has been done on the effects it had on school orchestra programs. Orchestra programs in Texas schools have had a historically strong…

Mexican American Studies (MAS) courses have been criticized for many years. Legislation in Arizona and Texas have attempted to ban the content. This article pushes back on this attempt of oppression and offers MAS teachers a framework to apply when teaching the content. Using a timeline to depict the years of attempts for Mexican American Studies…

Contrary to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell's majority opinion in "San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez" (1973), Texas's school finance system was the result of years of legislation and state-building that gave some areas the resources and capacity to provide more educational opportunities than others. As this…

Over the past century, American schools have been the focus of researchers and educators seeking to improve the education of the country's children. Few studies, though, have examined what the schools--their physical presence and the changes within them--have meant to the students who attended those schools (Currens 2017; Kilinc and Burlbaw 2011;…

Formal schooling in the U.S. has a long and violent history towards Indigenous peoples, today morphing into exclusion and erasure. Using a novel longitudinal dataset of U.S. textbooks (n = 193) from California and Texas, published from 1850 to 2019, we seek to shine light on the issue through a comprehensive analysis of depictions of Indigenous…

There are racial/ethnic disparities associated with school punishment practices and academic progress. In addition, research suggests that urban schools have stricter school punishment practices and higher grade retention rates. What remains unknown, however, is the relationship between race/ethnicity, school punishment practices, and retention…

We critically examined the odds of earning a college preparatory diploma for African American high school seniors receiving special education services under Texas's Top 10% Policy (TTPP). Critical policy analysis was used to explore the meritocratic guise of college access for African American youth with disabilities, and through DisCrit,…

Career and Technical Education (CTE) balances the pull between the practical and theoretical by applying academic knowledge to real-world problems, preparing students for a wide array of careers. Unfortunately, confusion and stereotypes still reign when it comes to what career and technical education is and is not, even as public sentiment shifts…

This paper takes a critical conceptual look at education policy and practice from the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 to the present. The paper examines the roots of current United States educational policies, and shows that, in some cases, well-intentioned efforts have had a negative impact on vulnerable populations…

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) prepares an annual report on graduates and dropouts in Texas public secondary schools. This report includes state summaries of the annual dropout rate, longitudinal graduation and dropout rates, and state attrition rates. In addition to statewide statistics, the report provides historical information about dropout…

"Turnaround" strategies of educational reform promise that school closure, reconstitution, privatizing, and reopening them will bring miraculous results. Questioning the implications, this article situates "turnaround" strategies locally, following the closure of a predominantly minority high school in 2008, in Austin, Texas.…

In this article, we examined the extant literature regarding college-readiness in math for students entering community colleges. Included in this review are the following topics: (a) the role of community colleges between secondary and postsecondary institutions; (b) national initiatives for college-readiness standards in math; (c) Texas…

This report describes how five states -- Alabama, Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee and Texas -- made exceptional progress in student achievement during the first decade of the 21st century. State leaders in these states all realized early in the decade that they had a problem they wanted to address. They established a "plan" at the state…

Changes to Title IX allowing the growth of single-sex schools have garnered media attention promoting the benefits of separating boys and girls. Alternately, civil rights groups such as the ACLU continue to oppose any type of school segregation. Within this context, a private philanthropy, the Foundation for the Education of Young Women (FEYW) has…

For more than a century, high school students in the United States have been required to take at least one course in United States History. Almost every U.S. history textbook used for these courses covers the Texas Revolution in one way or another. Since the Texas Revolution is a significant part of American history, the authors chose to focus…