To engage interests and connect with 21st-century learners, educators must be able to effectively use technologies in their classrooms. The problem this study addressed was the limited understanding that language arts educators in urban school districts have of effectively using technological tools while teaching digital literacy. The purpose of…

This research sought to examine the various types of social justice knowledge that 10 practicing teachers possessed and how this knowledge can be categorized and further nuanced. Drawing from the theoretical framework of social justice pedagogical and content knowledge, researchers inductively and deductively coded a corpus of interviews to…

Culturally responsive instruction scholarship often presents a binary standard that teachers either satisfy or do not, a determination largely based on perceptions of observed practice. Yet, conclusions about teachers' cultural responsiveness are dubious when researchers do not account for teachers' intent. Conceptualizing cultural responsiveness…

Drawing from theories of identity, language, and race, we conceptualize gateway moments to literate identities in high school English language arts classrooms enrolling language-minoritized youth. Gateways were interactions that afforded particular kinds of literate identities for youth. Deficit literate identities often invoked racialized…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act mandates that all school districts provide a free appropriate public education to students with Individualized Education Plans in their least restrictive environment. Co-teaching in inclusion classrooms is a collaborative effort, with a general education teacher and a special education teacher, to…

Building on exploratory research (Braun et al., 2017), this study assessed how Core Leadership Practices (CLP), implemented through leadership development training, related to increased equity in student learning. Results confirmed a significant (p<0.05, medium to large effect sizes) positive increase in student learning for students who had…

Project OCCAMS (Online Curriculum Consortium for Accelerating Middle School) is a collaboration between the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University, the Center for Gifted Education at The College of William & Mary, and Columbus Public Schools with a goal of providing accelerated learning in language arts aimed at increasing…

Ethnoracial inequality in educational achievement and attainment is a long-standing feature of the American education system. For example, national reading assessments show that White fourth graders scored nearly a standard deviation higher than Black or Hispanic students on average in 2015 (NCES, 2015). The measurement and analysis of differences…

We draw on novel district-level test score data to describe novel approaches for measuring ethnoracial achievement gaps and assessing trends toward achievement equity from 2009 to 2016. Using SEDA data, we estimate gap trends for each grade over time in each district. We measure trends in both within-district gaps--comparing Black or Hispanic to…

This brief presents an opportunity to gauge how well students with disabilities (SWDs) are doing across the states with respect to selected aspects of readiness for postsecondary success, with an emphasis on the gaps in performance between SWDs and all students, in each state. Achieve has long worked to promote the importance of college and career…

As teachers, it is important that we grapple with the reality that schools, teachers, and the larger social institutions that impact us are never neutral. Scholars explain that the starting place for teachers who want to enact practices for social justice and to disrupt harmful "single stories" is to read LGBTQ titles and consider how…

Through Engrossed Second Substitute House Bill 1599 (E2SHB 1599) the Legislature tasked the State Board of Education (SBE) with providing an analysis of the equity and adequacy of the new graduation pathway options through stakeholder outreach and engagement. SBE has solicited and received feedback on the graduation pathway options. In the…

Schools use an array of strategies to match curricula and instruction to students' heterogeneous skills. Although generations of scholars have debated ''tracking'' and its consequences, the literature fails to account for diversity of school-level sorting practices. In this article, we draw on the work of Sørensen and others to articulate and…

The most promising intervention for improving learning and reducing academic gaps in outcomes is present in every classroom: the "teacher". Teachers empowered to create relationship-centric, supportive classroom and school cultures, combined with rigorous academics, produce breakthrough results for their students. Three nonprofits'…

These two qualitative descriptive case studies investigated supports and barriers to integrating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as an instructional methodology in language arts and social studies departments at an urban and a suburban high school in Wisconsin. Integrated Comprehensive Systems (ICS) implementation was determined through the…