The COVID-19 pandemic forced more than 50 million students and their families to adapt to remote schooling. Most disrupted were communities of color, who faced multiple and overlapping inequalities in digital and equipment access, exposing and exacerbating existing disparities. Conducted in a small rural school district, this study surveyed the…

The purpose of this dissertation was to provide teachers, principals, district administrators, and local, state, and national legislators with an understanding of what the perception is of Hispanic American Immigrant parents regarding their access to parental engagement and agency through the American public school system, specifically elementary…

In the past 20 years, both school choice policies and dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs have proliferated across the US. This project examines the intersection of the two trends, examining how school choice policies have shaped DLBE at the district, school, and program level, through the eyes of 22 public school administrators in…

A wealth of literature shows positive outcomes and experiences from arts learning, yet youth access to arts education has become significantly more inequitable over the past 30 years. Alongside the growing discourse around arts learning and equity issues, there is a recognized and persistent need for more research. We conducted a critical,…

As the number of dual language programs in the U.S. is on the rise, district and school administrators need to pay attention to race as they design and implement these programs to offer equitable access for all students. Utilizing a CRT and raciolinguistics framework, qualitative interview data revealed the ways that whiteness operated in school…

The article explores the intersection of equity goals and language ideologies within a dual language bilingual education (DLBE) language policy context. We present two DLBE teachers, Karina and Marisol, and explore their language ideologies and professional conviction towards equitable learning opportunities for their students. We investigate how…

This critical ethnographic study investigated how gentrification processes shaped an elementary school's community and two-way bilingual education (TWBE) program in Central Texas. Findings revealed how these gentrification processes impacted the principal and vice principal at the ontological and epistemological levels, as their ways of being and…

Researchers have identified inequities in dual-language bilingual education (DLBE) student participation, and with large-scale DLBE expansion, equitable student access is an increasingly important issue. In this study, I used a multimethod, multisite, comparative analysis to critically examine educator discourses addressing student participation…

This article explores the placement practices of students into different educational programs in PreK-first grade, including two bilingual education programs and an ESL "mainstream" classroom. We then examine the discourse practices of four third-grade teachers and the school principal. Our findings suggest that initial program placement…

Since 2011, Grantmakers for Education has offered a series of investigative programs designed to examine the role grantmakers can play in creating more equitable systems of education. GFE's programming included place-based programs in El Paso, Texas, Newark, New Jersey, Oakland, California, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. During this time, Grantmakers…

Classrooms tend to be absolute spaces, places where fluidity is rejected and nearly everything--from people, to ideas, to practices and policies--is viewed and organized through binary logic. Because binary logic is implicitly accepted as the natural order in schools and the structures resulting from it are highly unmalleable, individuals who…

"Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) was a landmark decision that was the result of decades of efforts by grassroots activists and civil rights organizations to end legalized segregation. A less well-known effort challenged the extralegal segregation of Mexican American students in the Southwest. I combine original research and research…

Relying on life history and memory as methodology, this essay unearths the memories of schooling of five Mexican American teachers at a dual-language school in San Antonio, locating their memories of trauma within the history of language oppression and cultural exclusion in U.S. public schools. In re(membering) their schooling experiences as…

The United States Commission on Civil Rights held hearings in San Antonio, Texas from December 9 to 14, 1968 under the authority of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The purpose of the hearing was to collect information regarding the civil rights problems of Mexican Americans in the five Southwestern States. Of concern were the issues of education,…

East Texas, home to a large English language learner (ELL) population, is the setting for a successful program that offers students support for both language development and subject-matter learning. In this article, the authors examine why East Texas is so successful in closing the achievement gap of its minority students. The authors also…