This article comes from an investigation into the identities and leadership traits of seven urban school principals committed to social justice across elementary, middle, and high school levels. These administrators believed that enacting social justice for marginalized students was instrumental in their desire to become school leaders and central…

Florida's decision to equate a GED to a high school diploma undermines the attempt of No Child Left Behind to close the achievement gap, while infringing on the public's trust. Public trust fosters a culture of systemic equity and social justice, which are necessary for academic excellence (Byrk & Schneider, 2003). Florida's code of ethics for…

Founded in 2006 by Jonathan Osler, Math and Community Organizing teacher at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, a public CES high school in Brooklyn, New York, Radical Math is an organization for educators working to integrate issues of political, economic, and social justice into math education. In April 2007, Radical Math cosponsored…

In the mathematics department at Vanguard High School, the author and his colleagues have taken on a mission to raise students' interest, skill, understanding, and performance in mathematics. Over the past several years, they have wrestled with the implications of the achievement gap, a pressing fact for them, as students enter their school well…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss, utilising Miller's theoretical framework for social justice, findings of a research study examining the dramatic musical and educational results of an alternative music education programme in Toronto, Canada. What is particularly striking about the findings are the ways in which the participants (youth…

Zero-tolerance discipline policies, harsh sentencing laws, and the gentrification of communities of color have devastating effects for the lives of young people. Coupled with the fact that urban schools can devalue their views, values, and understandings of the world, this article examines an effort to challenge deficit theories that permeate…

This research compares representations of rap music with the self-reported criminal behavior and resistant attitudes of the music's core audience. Our database is a large sample of Toronto high school students (n = 3,393) from which we identify a group of listeners, whose combination of musical likes and dislikes distinguish them as rap univores.…

Background/Context: A group of educators have demonstrated success not only with White middle-class and affluent students but also with students from varied racial, socioeconomic, linguistic, ability, and cultural backgrounds. A reoccurring theme from these schools and from the literature on school change is that exemplary leadership helps create…

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of socially relevant mathematics applications in high school mathematics classrooms and students' views of mathematics in light of their experiences with these applications. Also, the study sought to determine whether inquiries afforded by these applications incorporated features that promoted…

In this article, I examine the ways in which silences around race contribute to the maintenance and legitimation of Whiteness. Drawing on ethnographic data from two demographically different schools, I highlight patterns of racially coded language, teacher silence, silencing students' race talk, and the conflating of culture with race, equality…

High school teacher John Golden interviews social justice educator Linda Christensen. Golden and Christensen begin by expanding on an understanding of social justice and a teacher's role in the social justice classroom. They continue by addressing complicated issues of student empowerment, meeting state standards, and choosing appropriate texts…

High school teacher Julie Gorlewski considers the complexities of multicultural education and the challenges of realizing its potential as a social movement. She explains how students became "powerful users of language" by writing to the editors of their literature anthology to question what appeared to be censorship through alterations to text…

This article is a case study designed to challenge the beliefs, values, and ideology of graduate students in educational leadership preparation programs regarding social justice and democratic education. This case is designed to assist students in developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to navigate the micropolitical environments that…

Existing problems identified in the literature on teacher retention and resilience include (a) a gap in understanding factors influencing urban teacher retention; (b) lack of clarity on multiple factors swaying teachers' decisions to remain despite challenges; (c) overlapping definitions of teacher retention, attrition, and resilience; and (d)…

This case study examines the perspectives of a teacher and a set of students in a U.S. history classroom in a "last chance" public New York City high school--with "last chance" being a common term used to describe schools designed for struggling students, those who have a history of truancy, or those who have dropped out. The…