This article examines how school boards in New Jersey navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, which also coincided with the national trauma and reactions related to the George Floyd murder and subsequent backlash. The politicization of issues during that first year of the pandemic foreshadowed profound changes in the world of many school boards in New…

This qualitative study gathered the perspectives of public school superintendents on truancy interventions. The study sample consisted of five school superintendents employed within five New Jersey Public School Districts and included four males and one female with a minimum of twenty-five years of experience in public school settings. Each…

Drawing from a context of reception framework, this article asks the following questions: How do educators describe issues of safety and belonging in the context of a charged immigration policy climate? What practices have educators developed to support immigrant-origin youth? And, what are the relationships between educators' perceptions of…

This study examines "First 10 Schools and Communities"--coordinated efforts to improve teaching, learning, and care during the first decade of children's lives. First 10 initiatives take two basic forms. First 10 School Hubs are anchored by a single elementary school, which provides direct support to families and collaborates with nearby…

"Disrupting Disruption" shows how three racially and ethnically diverse school districts--Union NJ, Union City OK, and Roanoke City VA--have defied the demographic odds, boosting overall graduation rates while shrinking or eliminating the opportunity gap. These districts resemble many others in their student population. What makes them…

For eight years, more than a dozen district superintendents in New Jersey have joined together for a full day each month during the school year to listen to and learn from each other as a community of practice. Known as the New Jersey Network of Superintendents, this community of practice has a tight focus on advancing equity through improvement…

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological case study was to investigate the experiences of eight New Jersey teachers involved in state-mandated school improvement processes in order to determine what teachers value in the improvement process and identify how involvement impacts their perception of their practice. In-depth phenomenological…

Roaring Falls Unified School District (a pseudonym), an urban New Jersey district near NYC, was challenged by K-8 Multilingual Language Learners (MLLs) who lagged significantly behind general education students in English Language Arts (ELA). The District had roughly 12,000 students, of whom 93.0% were Hispanic, 26.2% were MLLs, and 32.0% were…

The purpose of this qualitative instrumental case study was to explore the professional learning outcomes of teachers as they implement community-based instruction programs for students with disabilities in a New Jersey school district. The study was viewed through the theoretical lens of disabilities studies in education, which posits that the…

Beginning teacher resilience has become a topic of international interest, as all school districts are invested in retaining talented teachers. This study builds on extant literature on the role of mentors by examining the influence of mentoring on beginning teachers' perceptions of acceptance not only in the school but in the larger community…

This correlational, explanatory, longitudinal study sought to determine the combination of community and family-level demographic variables found in the 2010 U.S. Census data that most accurately predicted a New Jersey school district's percentage of students scoring proficient or above on the 2010, 2011, and 2012 NJ ASK 7 in Language Arts and…

The Citywide Education Progress Reports evaluate how a city is doing across three goals: (1) The education system should be continuously improving; (2) All students should have access to a high-quality education; and (3) The education strategy should be rooted in the community. Across each goal, indicators are presented of system reforms and…

In America today, families in almost every urban community have some kind of public school choice. This report focuses on "public school choice," under which families are able to choose from both an array of traditional public schools and public charter schools. Public school choice has grown rapidly in the past 20 years; new charter…

This manual was written to help guide education stakeholders--including parents, students, school board members, community activists, administrators, policymakers and attorneys--in their efforts to promote racial diversity and avoid racial isolation in suburban school systems. Critical information on the current legal, political and policy issues…

School districts on the leading edge of the Birth through Third Grade movement have demonstrated unprecedented success raising the achievement of low-income students by developing coherent strategies focused on the early years of learning and development. These communities are not merely improving preschool. Rather, they are building aligned,…