This study explored the impact of academically supported mentorship on the self-efficacy and perceptions of racially marginalized high school students regarding advanced course enrollment. Using a mixed-methods approach, it combined quantitative pre- and post-intervention surveys with qualitative open-ended questions and semi-structured…

This action research study explored the use of mentorship as an intervention to improve the attendance chronically absent ninth grade students at an urban high school. Chronic absenteeism is a phenomenon with multiple compounding negative impacts on students. Moreover, it is a complicated problem with multiple contributing factors and potential…

This quantitative comparison study was conducted to determine if there is a significant difference in multicultural and social justice competencies (MSJCC) between urban and rural school counselors in Pennsylvania. The purpose of the study was to discover how school counselors in different geographical areas assess their work within a…

Restorative justice has the potential to re-frame schools as caring and politically conscious educational spaces. As it moves to the mainstream, however, it risks being co-opted by the carceral logics that undergird the schooling of Black students in the United States. This ethnographic analysis interrogates how restorative justice provides…

College-level study abroad participation has been shown to positively influence a range of student outcomes including GPA, graduation rates, cultural competence, cultural capital acquisition, as well as, students' leadership skills. However, the influence of study abroad at the high school programs have mostly gone unresearched. The study abroad…

This qualitative case study explored the unique ways recent college graduates serving as full-time, near-peer mentors supported students along the path to college in three different urban public high schools. By applying the theory of figured worlds to school spaces and practices, this study sought to both define the physical and figurative ways…

In 2018, the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) enacted a new law called Act 44, which provided new form of funding for school safety in school districts across the State of Pennsylvania. The study focused on how school superintendents and high school principals prioritized each category in Pennsylvania Act 44 from highest to the lowest…

This article relies on nonrepresentational narrative research to consider improvisational urban literacy. The author uses narrative to theorize the choice to teach "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" in urban high school English classrooms. The author positions this decision as the surprising result of an improvisational, urban literacy…

Despite the popularity of distributed leadership theory, the investigation of the micro-political aspects of such models have scarcely been explored, and insights on the cultural variety of distributed practices in schools are limited. The present study aimed to explore what micro-political aspects emerge in participative decision making in…

In scholarly conversations of college readiness, the academic performance of Latinx students largely hinges on questions of culture. College success necessitates fluency in dominant cultural capital and community cultural wealth. Inner-city high schools, however, inadequately endow Latinx students with dominant cultural capital and are often…

Purpose: Civic education is a central mission of public schools, and deeper learning of civics--learning that is complex and adaptive--is the goal. However, assessment of deeper civic learning is limited. Therefore, we aimed to develop an assessment model and test of deeper learning in the common high school civics course taught across the U.S.…

Inner city high school teachers in the Midwest United States lack expertise in integrating technology into their curriculum. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore the experiences of inner city high school teachers in using technology-enhanced instruction to teach 21st-century skills in a public comprehensive high school in the…

Advocates for the use of a multi-measure system of performance evaluation argue that multiple measures may better capture meaningful differences in employee effectiveness and help align effort with organizational objectives. This may be particularly important in organizations such as schools that produce multiple outcomes. In this paper I use a…

Purpose: This study aimed to explore students' perspectives and experiences of social and emotional learning (SEL) during physical education high school classes. Method: Using a case study design, focus group and individual interviews were implemented with 42 students. Based on the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning's SEL…

This article investigates students' engagement with a historical inquiry into redlining--a practice of discriminatory lending that originated in the 1930s as part of the New Deal. The authors developed and implemented a week-long curricular intervention for high school sophomores using StoryQ--an Artificial Intelligence (AI) textual modeling…