In the course of a weeding project at a small community college library, librarians discovered an unusual nineteenth century literary collection consisting of many obscure titles written by people of color, women and ethnic minorities. Though the materials were not rare, they constituted an interesting and valuable set of materials. These…

Education Sector commissioned an earlier version of this collection of essays in conjunction with a March 2012 event "Getting to 2014: The Choices and Challenges Ahead." This updated version includes new essays and a revised introduction. The aim of these essays is to present ideas, elicit feedback, and encourage productive dialogue…

This publication summarizes research from AspenWSI's Courses to Employment project, which studied how six community college-nonprofit partnerships work together to help low-income adults succeed in the classroom and the labor market. The report provides an overview of the approach and strategies these partnerships use, how these partnerships are…

This qualitative study is based on in-depth interviews with 40 representatives from 12 community-based organizations (CBOs) working with the Steans Center for Community-based Service-Learning at DePaul University in Chicago. These CBOs see themselves as partners with the University in educating college students about the realities of racial and…

This author asserts that faculty should publicly and tenaciously support graduate student organizing campaigns. She states this not only from her perspective as a staff member of the largest higher education local in Illinois, University Professionals of Illinois Local 4100, which represents faculty and staff at seven of the state's public…

In the wake of the videotaped beating death of a Chicago high school student, law-enforcement officials and educators called this week for renewed efforts to stem youth violence. But they also acknowledged that money and programs alone will not solve the problem. Cabinet members traveled to Chicago to offer money and to call for adults to play a…

Living in a threatening, noxious, and dangerous neighborhood may produce anxiety, anger, and depression because it is subjectively alienating. We hypothesize that neighborhood disorder represents ambient threat that elicits perceptions of powerlessness, normlessness, mistrust, and isolation. These perceptions in turn lead to anxious and angry…

Most chief development officers (CDOs) genuinely like--and fully respect--their institution's leadership. Considered by many the most important professional relationship at an educational institution, a strong CEO-CDO connection takes insight, planning, and persistence on the part of the development officer. Theirs is a delicate relationship…

For Gloria Ladson-Billings, culturally relevant pedagogy is characterized by three criteria: academic success, cultural competence and critical consciousness. Those engaged in culturally relevant pedagogy are connected by how they see themselves as teachers and how they see their students, how they view knowledge and how they structure social…

Inspiring students to become teachers and community leaders is a goal of Douglas Taylor School's leadership team. A feeling of continuity and connection are important to the school, which opened in the 19th century. Housed in a beautiful old school building in Chicago's South Side, Douglas Taylor School contains grades preK-8. To maintain the…

This article is the report of a large-scale, international research project involving focus group interviews of adolescent and young adult members of a variety of self-initiated visual culture groups in five urban areas (Amsterdam, Budapest, Chicago, Helsinki, and Hong Kong). Each group was established by young people around their interests in the…

What explains the persistent disparate enrollment of black students in gifted and talented education programs? The bulk of the literature attributes these enrollment patterns to teacher bias against black students, a lack of knowledge about how giftedness manifests itself in black youth, and the apathy of black parents in the identification…

This study evaluates how welcoming thirty American cities--the twenty-five largest and five smaller "hotspots"--are to "nontraditional" problem-solvers and solutions. It assumes that the balky bureaucracies meant to improve K-12 education and hold leaders accountable are so calcified by policies, programs, contracts, and…

Despite increased recent attention to improving the quality of encounters between police officers and people with serious mental illness, there are no measures available for assessing how consumers perceive their interactions with police officers. Drawing upon conceptual frameworks developed within social psychology, this study reports the…

This article reports data from a large-scale assessment using the Family Outcomes Survey with families participating in early intervention. The study was designed to determine how families describe themselves with regard to outcomes achieved, the extent to which outcomes are interrelated, and the extent to which child, family, and program factors…