Designers of critical mathematics instruction have documented difficulties in simultaneously fostering the development of critical consciousness while supporting students in developing understandings of new mathematics. However, confining justice-oriented tasks to applications of previously learned mathematics limits the degree to which these…

In an attempt to respond to the calls for dance educators to explore alternatives to harmful authoritarian teaching practices, we propose that one such route forward is an Activist Approach to teaching, which was originally developed in physical education contexts as a student-centered, inquiry-based approach that attends to issues of embodiment…

Over the last 30 years, the school choice movement has been one of the most prominent large-scale reform efforts in American education. In recent years, charter schools and voucher programs, in particular, have been a focus of policy makers and philanthropists. Mark Berends presents an overview of these two models, their prevalence, and what…

For many decades, traditional public schools were the dominant public schools available for educating students, including those with disabilities. However, in the current climate of school choice, parents can now choose from a variety of educational options for their children. This study sought to explore the reasons parents of students with…

This fourth of six briefs analyzing data from the 2020-2021 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), released earlier this year, focuses on the experiences of students with disabilities with disciplinary practices at both charter schools and traditional public schools. Though the COVID-19 pandemic was still in its early stages, concerns about the…

Perhaps the most extreme step that education leaders can take to improve school quality is to close a school entirely. School closures are controversial due to the harms and disruptions they can create for families. These harms may be particularly severe if displaced families do not receive adequate support in transitioning to new schools. Since…

Closing the achievement gap has been a continuous topic of conversation in the United States for decades. School leaders have explored many ways to address the academic achievement of their marginalized student population. One approach has been the implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy and curriculum. By implementing a curriculum in which…

Examining school-wide factors that can positively influence student and school success is especially crucial after the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in a period of online learning that led to a decrease in student achievement scores across the nation. As a result, this study sought to assess how schedule design specifically affected teacher…

This third of six briefs analyzing data from the U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2020-21 school year, explores the educational settings where students with disabilities spend their time. As was the case in the analysis of the previous CRDC covering the 2018-19 school year, students with disabilities spend more time in…

This final of six briefs analyzing data from the U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), covering the 2020-21 school year, explores the characteristics of the 176 charter schools with a specific focus on students with disabilities. This group, representing 2.3% of charter schools nationwide, is heavily concentrated in a handful of states and is…

When refugees are forced to flee their country, they leave for a number of reasons. Some refugees resettle in the United States, in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo is home to a large number of Burmese refugees over the years and some of those refugees are children. Schools can play an important role in children's lives and school administrators can…

I investigate longitudinal preferences for schools revealed by families' applications to middle and high schools within a large urban school district's universal enrollment system. I find that preferences for schools' racial/ethnic composition are more stable than preferences for quality and proximity to home, even after concurrently controlling…

Educators in a rural charter middle school in the United States were challenged with the reliable assessment of student thinking skills even though the development of higher order thinking was an espoused goal for the school. The purpose of this study was to validate a new rubric based on Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (BRT) to reliably assess student…

The Kauffman School is a public, tuition-free charter school serving Kansas City students. In the 2018-19 school year, the school enrolled 1,127 students in grades 5 through 12. Most (89 percent) of the students were low income, and 89 percent were Black or Hispanic. This report evaluates the impact of the Kauffman School on student college…

Critical consciousness refers to the ability to analyze and take action against oppressive social forces shaping society. This longitudinal, mixed methods study compared the critical consciousness development of adolescents of color (n = 453) attending two sets of high schools featuring schooling models that represent "opposing"…