Persistent educational inequity for immigrant and refugee students and their families calls for instructional practices centering on access, quality, and social justice. Drawing on two qualitative case studies, this article examines how three U.S. urban school teachers attended to the systemic inequalities and unique challenges confronting…

In response to numerous calls for more rigorous STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education to improve US competitiveness and the job prospects of next-generation workers, especially those from low-income and minority groups, a growing number of schools emphasizing STEM have been established in the US over the past decade.…

This mixed-methods study examines educational experiences of Latino immigrant young adult dropouts in New York City, along with pre- and postmigration factors that impact school participation. Due to age, interrupted schooling, and limited English proficiency, high schools view this population as hard to serve. Increasing numbers of these youth…

This manuscript, written with the educator in mind, describes the Youth Historians in Harlem (YHH) program, a twenty-week after-school history program that engaged urban students in history by immersing them in aspects of the historical process. Throughout the program, a group of Black male high school students were apprenticed as historical…

In this paper, I provide a window into the lived experience of a group of urban high school science students confronted with the stigma associated with special education, disability, and academic failure and present tools to understanding the ideological forces and institutional structures that undermine the ability of schools to create a culture…

Students' engagement and performance in their first year of high school offer strong signals about their prospects for earning a diploma 4 years later. These performance measures can be used to construct "on-track" indicators to measure a school's performance and to identify needs of specific students who are at risk of dropping out.…

The author discusses the boarding school model as a schooling alternative to improve life chances for disadvantaged youth, particularly African American youth, by positively meeting their social and educational needs. Bourdieu, Coleman, and other social scientists purported that these needs can be better met by exposing students to social and…

The present case study investigated the impact of a short-term summer literacy approach on writing performance and self-perception of writing for young adolescents of low-income families residing in urban housing projects. The approach offered intensive literacy engagement to offset summer achievement loss; assisted ethnic-minority, low…

Urban environmental educators are trying to connect students to the urban environment and nature, and thus develop a certain sense of place. To do so, educators involve students in environmental stewardship, monitoring, activism, and outdoor recreation in cities. At the same time, sense of place has been linked to pro-environmental behaviors and…

Today's public school principals lead under conditions of significant pressures for change. At the local level, principals are the primary receivers and interpreters of the discourses and demands for change coming from central administration. Principals must make sense of these discourses and demands for change at the local school level, and they…

This article will put forth an introductory argument and evidence for school non-completion as a form of biopower, and school dropout to be considered a form of biopolitical youth resistance in the United States (US). Beginning with a brief overview of the empirical relationship of education to health and current graduation rates in the United…

The purpose of this paper is to describe and present results from the fourth year of a five-year collaborative research project between an interactive science center and a local college. The purpose of the project is not only to recruit and train approximately 50 highly qualified science teachers who will teach in New York City public schools, but…

Representative samples of fourth- and eighth-grade public school students from 21 urban districts participated in the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in mathematics. Eighteen of the districts participating in the 2011 NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) participated in earlier assessment years, while three districts…

Representative samples of fourth- and eighth-grade public school students from 21 urban districts participated in the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading. Eighteen of the districts participating in the 2011 NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) participated in earlier assessment years, while three districts…

The $1 million Broad Prize in Urban Education, the nation's largest K-12 public education award given annually by The Broad Foundation, is awarded to urban school districts that demonstrate the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement while reducing income and ethnic achievement gaps. One hundred of the largest urban…