The past few years have seen a rise in interest in local elected offices, specifically in school board seats. These seats hold unequivocal power over what school districts can do in terms of advancing equity and excellence in education. We explore one facet of what became a playbook of anti-equity efforts in school districts during the COVID-19…

Operating from intersecting theories of validation, marginality, and mattering, this phenomenological study investigated undocumented student support services from the perspective of 49 Undocumented Student Resource Center (USRC) practitioners. In-depth interviews highlighted the ways that USRC practitioners served as validating agents, directly…

In this essay, Luis E. Poza argues that educational dignity can help practices and reforms targeting students classified as English learners move beyond a narrow focus on programmatic and material factors related to English language development and instead toward more holistic consideration of these students and their schooling ecologies. In…

The overall aim of the Effective Implementation Cohort (EIC) investment is to increase district capacity to implement a high-quality middle years math curriculum as part of a Coherent Instructional System (CIS) to accelerate learning for students who are experiencing poverty, Black, Latino/a, and/or English Learner (EL)-Designated ("priority…

This article traces how Mexican American Studies (MAS) scholar activists led and supported a statewide movement for MAS in Texas. As a Xicana feminist scholar activist, Saldan~a draws from her retrospective memory and personal archive of organizational notes, movement documents, personal testimonies before the State Board of Education, and photos,…

Emerging practices in both K-12 and higher education hold great promise in the establishment of equity frameworks. The use of finely disaggregated data, the effort to track additional student groups, and related work, all help to establish policies and tools to monitor the impact of reform efforts to address inequities. State programs and…

Educators, researchers, and policy makers concerned about college under-enrollment among underserved groups of students have traditionally focused reform efforts at the high school level. Over the last several decades, however, there has been a growing interest in improving college readiness beginning at the elementary level. Recently, the…

In this descriptive and comparative study, we present results highlighting the complexity and scope of the challenges facing rural districts as they navigate the changing demographics of the students and families they serve. Rapid increases in the number and concentration of racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students in rural areas…

When schools closed their doors in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a scramble to adjust to remote learning. Over the summer and into the fall, the debate over reopening took center stage, as school leaders struggled to answer how and when it would be safe to return to the classroom. The Center for American Progress (CAP)…

Minority students and students with disabilities are disciplined disproportionately from their peers. Discipline has led to many negative consequences in the lives of youth in the United States, including the school-to-prison pipeline. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Education issued guidance encouraging school districts to develop policies that…

Purpose: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Next Generation Courseware Challenge (NGCC) in 2014 to address the limited availability of affordable, high-quality adaptive courseware to postsecondary students. SRI International was retained to evaluate the NGCC initiative as a whole and to conduct impact studies for the NGCC…

The dismissal of students' backgrounds by the educational system has a deep effect on communities of color, perpetuating a system that sets them up for academic failure. Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) created terminology for the process of systematic fragmentation, which she describes as an act of dismissal on a macro-level. This article…

Racial microaggressions are racial slights and subtle insults aimed at people of color. These may be verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual, and may be automatic or unconscious. The term microaggression is also applied to women or other groups in society who experience oppression. While it has been established that students of color often face racial…

This book brings together distinguished scholars, community college practitioners, and emerging leaders to expand upon existing theories, provide reflection on practice, and demonstrate the dynamic nature of community college internationalization. There is a special challenge for United States community colleges to move from selected international…

The author reports on the ruling of a divided appellate court that held that the state law unconstitutionally made it harder for minorities to seek preferences than for other groups. The court struck down a voter-passed ban on the use of race-conscious admissions by Michigan's public colleges, holding that the measure had unconstitutionally put…