Youth of color enrolled in urban public high schools, particularly those students who seek to be the first in their families to graduate from college, frequently encounter barriers to their college readiness and access. This study engaged an analytic approach built with culturally relevant and sustaining theories of education to examine how 10…

This study involved a secondary analysis of data collected across the 2016-2017 academic year to determine the impact on students' social and emotional well-being of a new hip-hop lyricism course implemented by a school counselor. The new course introduced hip-hop and spoken word therapy into a specially designed classroom curriculum to meet the…

Executive functions (EFs) show promise as important mediators of adolescent academic performance. However, the expense of measuring EFs accurately has restricted most field-based research on them to smaller, non-longitudinal studies of homogeneous populations with specific diagnoses. We therefore monitored the development of 259 diverse, at-risk…

This paper explores teaching mathematics for spatial justice (Soja, 2010), as an extension of teaching mathematics for social justice (Gutstein, 2006). The study is contextualized in a 10-session curricular module focused on the spatial justice of a city's two-tiered system of personal finance institutions (mainstream vs. alternative), piloted…

Despite their long history and importance in the American curriculum, music programs must constantly justify their place in the twenty-first century. Urban areas that are economically depressed sometimes may not be able to offer music instruction due to the emphasis on raising test scores as well as unfavorable economic conditions that may limit…

The iMentor College Ready Program is a model that combines school-based mentoring with technology and aspects of whole school reform. The program aims to create strong relationships between low-income youth and college-educated mentors--and to leverage these relationships to help students develop the mindsets, skills, and knowledge necessary to…

The iMentor College Ready Program combines school-based mentoring with technology and aspects of whole school reform. The program strives to create strong relationships between low-income youth and college-educated mentors--relationships that it hopes to leverage to help students develop the mindsets, skills, and knowledge necessary to enroll and…