School assignment in Boston and New York City came to national attention in the 1970s as courts across the country tried to integrate schools. Today, district-wide choice allows Boston and New York students to enroll far from home. Although 1970s desegregation efforts likely benefited minority students, urban school transportation is increasingly…

With the introduction and implementation of core literacy, scientific thinking (ST) has become an essential goal and key dimension of science teaching. At present, there is no agreement on how to cultivate students' ST. This study took 238 sixth grade students from a public primary school in urban China as research sample, built a theoretical…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the impact of participating in a school garden-based project on the sense of social connectedness of urban elementary school students and university service-learning students within the urban community. The study found that the sixth-grade participants experienced improvements in their sense…

This study examined preservice teachers' instruction of goals in specific learning domains in physical education class and students' interpretation of these goals. Four preservice physical education teachers (all male) from a large urban university taught two lessons to eight sixth-grade students at an urban K-6 elementary school. The theory of…

Scaffolding ensures multilingual learners (ML) are adequately challenged and supported at school while learning English and subject area content. Due to the dynamic nature of language development, teachers may struggle to anticipate how to adequately scaffold lessons or reflect on their practice to identify areas for improvement. This paper…

This is the policy brief for the discussion paper, "Still Worth the Trip? School Busing Effects in Boston and New York." While choice systems offer students in segregated neighborhoods access to schools that may be more integrated and of higher quality, does busing lead to improved academic performance as measured by higher test scores…

In collaboration with an urban public school, teacher candidates at a nearby university created a social-emotional skills project called Knight Brigade. The author discusses the project planning, implementation, and results as part of this ongoing partnership.

Real-world experiences, such as situated learning, fieldwork, and student teaching have been among the most prevalent examples employed in teacher preparation programs. Despite the increasing evidence in support of service learning in music teacher preparation, there are a limited number of models specific to instrumental music education. The…

The purpose of this report is to demonstrate the power of connecting Children's Savings Account (CSAs) to college access-success programs and show that, when done together, they produce greater outcomes. First, we briefly describe these closely related fields and explain the merit of partnerships between CSA initiatives and college access and…

How do teacher candidates develop their knowledge in second language literacy to support their students in a Professional Development School (PDS)? This article reports preliminary findings of a qualitative study that investigates the learning process of single-subject credential candidates in a pilot urban PDS site where they co-taught and…

The writing achievement of English learners (ELs) is often lower than that of other subgroups (Fry, 2007, 2008). To address this gap, a partnership was formed between university faculty and doctoral students and educators at an urban PK-8 school with a majority EL population. Using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a guide, the team…

In our explorations of students' concepts in an inquiry science classroom with grade 6 students from urban schools in India, we uncovered a variety of problems in their understanding of biological cells as structural and functional units of living organisms. In particular, we found not only that they visualised the cell as a two-dimensional (2-D)…

Preparation for college and careers begins when students are young, yet, it can be difficult for middle grade educators to know how best to prepare these students for future success. Middle grade practitioners need to know what to pay attention to and who needs additional support. Without knowing how to identify students who are on-track for high…

By leveraging the strengths and commitments of each of the partners, a university, a private nonprofit, and a middle-sized urban school district, collaborated to impact student learning of key concepts in middle-grade mathematics and to change mathematics teaching. The project targeted middle grades mathematics because success in it is the…

African American youth are characterized as experiencing declining academic motivation and engagement while simultaneously maintaining optimism for their future success. Thus, researchers hypothesize academic motivation to be a negative factor for educational aspirations when applied to an urban sample of African American middle school students (N…