This document presents an in-depth exploration of the challenges and dynamics in discussing Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Texas high schools, particularly in the wake of House Bill 3979, often called the Critical Race Theory Bill. The author, a Mexican female educator, and a recent doctoral graduate, utilizes a unique narrative bridging academic…

As the hospitality and tourism workforce evolves high school Career and Technology Education (CTE) hospitality and tourism programs must remain relevant and innovative (Gauthier, 2020). One of the main goals of offering hospitality and tourism as a program of study during high school is to transition graduates into the hospitality and tourism…

Authored by a teacher-researcher design team, this manuscript explores the boundaries and processes of literacy research enacted across perilous timescales. Building from fieldnotes, reflections, and dialogue from a two and a half year social design-based experiment, this study extends scholarship focused on kinship and communities of practice.…

This project creates the first educational pipeline for the state of Texas. It incorporates middle school as a key transition point, differentiates between advanced degree achievement among Latinas/os and Chicanas/os, and fashions a secondary pipeline with a narrower age range. Findings indicate that the move from eighth grade to ninth is a…

Background/Context: There is a growing concern about the ways in which geography affects the educational opportunity for America's rural youth. Most research on this population has assumed that rural America is primarily White and that rural college access is stratified by an individual's ability to complete the application process. Such…

This qualitative dissertation explores how the principal's leadership roles build capacity for change and how chaos theory contributes to this understanding. The roles studied include distributive leadership, moral leadership, social justice leadership, democratic leadership, and instructional leadership. The tenets of chaos theory examined…

Instructional leadership efforts are complicated when leaders and teachers do not share areas of expertise. Leaders work to bridge this divide through a number of approaches, such as collaboration with specialist personnel and the development of leadership content knowledge (LCK). The purpose of this study was to explore the organizational factors…

Anti-immigrant vitriol is growing, even disturbing our educational spaces. Teachers are also affected by the negative discourses around them and need to develop knowledge that shapes their attitudes and actions regarding immigrant youth. This article details a professional development with high school teachers that used reader response to develop…

In this essay, Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia explore how young people from six demographically distinct communities across the United States understand the social and political issues affecting their lives, engage in storytelling and dialogue across differences, and collaboratively imagine humanizing and hopeful civic futures. Drawing from…

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…

This qualitative study focused on high school social studies teachers' understandings of and perspectives about vocabulary acquisition and instruction. The research questions were the following: (1) What do high school social studies teachers understand about vocabulary instruction? and (2) How do high school social studies teachers support…

In an attempt to broaden participation in STEM, a new type of high school is emerging, high schools which include a focus on engineering, have few or no academic admission criteria, and actively involve students of all levels of ability, known as Inclusive STEM High Schools (ISHSs). One aspect of successful ISHSs includes the intentional and…

A high school English teacher/doctoral student and two university researchers share a three-part framework for educating emergent bilinguals across disciplines with these constructs: language, literacy, and love. Through long-term professional development, teachers at two high schools began to view language as translanguaging, literacy as…

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,…

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of women high school principals to uncover challenges contributing to the underrepresentation of women in secondary school leadership. Moreover, this work is situated within the larger movement of educational leadership for social justice, with a focused application of a…