Much is unknown about those who do not finish high school and there is a need to understand who enters and completes alternative high school completion programs, such as the HiSet (High School Equivalency Test), GED (General Education Development Test), or growing number of state sponsored high school equivalency programs. The purpose for…

This paper uses the case of New York City teachers' interpretations of the labels that are assigned to their performance to explore how teachers experience teacher evaluation systems. Based on our analyses of 141 interviews with New York City teachers, we argue that the ordinal performance labels assigned to teachers by New York City's…

Two studies, one of middle school students and the other of high school students, demonstrated that students who were labeled as 'struggling' in the area of literacy saw themselves quite differently when their voices were heard. When these labeled students were viewed through a strengths lens rather than a deficits one, competent literacy skills…

This paper reports on a case study conducted in Mid-western Nepal, aiming to explore the potential impacts of precarious working conditions on part-time teachers' lives and identify ways to eliminate those working conditions. The data for the study were collected using semi-structured interviews from purposefully selected part-time teachers…

The experiences of girls of color labeled with significant cognitive disabilities in middle school and high school have historically been excluded from educational research. This study sought to better understand how girls of color labeled with significant cognitive disabilities navigated multimodal discourses and classroom practices as well as…

Intellectual giftedness is commonly associated with a high level of intellectual functioning, an identification process whereby individuals are labeled as "gifted," and adjustments in schools such as grade skipping. During adolescence, all these factors are prone to reduce peer connectedness and school life satisfaction. The aim of the…

The ways in which educators talk about diversity, and specifically about linguistic diversity, reflect underlying beliefs about language in society and influence teaching practice. Semi-structured interviews with 55 high school teachers in the Netherlands were analyzed qualitatively in order to identify teachers' discourse patterns related to the…

Understanding identity labels as "jaulas" [cages] and testimonios as theory and method, this article centers bi/multilingual Latinx students' experiences in high school English Language Development (ELD) classes. We present how two teachers, now researchers, built long-term relationships with former elementary school students, affording…

Static reading labels are problematic not only because youths demonstrate varying reading skills and identities across secondary classrooms but also because being labeled as "struggling" can undermine literacy learning. Little research has investigated how "struggling" and "proficient" readers' interactions with…

This article focuses of 13 high school boys' experiences of getting into "trouble" in a former Coloured township high school in KwaZulu-Natal Province. This ethnographic study explored the reasons for boys being considered "troublesome" at school. Data collection included focus groups, semi-structured open-ended individual…

In this response article, the author agrees with Jacobson that the labeling of individuals as "hard to serve" is unfortunate and misdirected in that it suggests that these students are somehow deficient and are the problem rather than identifying complex systemic issues that make some adult education programs necessary in the first…

Since the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted, grading and labeling of schools as low performing have been increasingly used as means to incentivize failing schools to raise student achievement. Using statewide high school data from Michigan, our regression discontinuity analyses show that the bottom 5% of schools identified as persistently…

This narrative inquiry highlights the experiences of three high school students labeled Long-term English learners (LTEL) in a North Texas high school. This narrative inquiry study uses semi-structured interviews to restory the students' lives, emphasizing the emergent themes of family (the strongest pillar) and the language of the home (Spanish).…

Previous research in middle-class school districts has focused on "within-school" segregation but not "between-school" segregation. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 122 in-depth interviews with students, parents, and faculty in an affluent suburban school district, I find that students who struggle…

Using theories of positioning, emotion, and power as a lens, this study explores the lived experiences of a reader labeled as struggling who was enrolled in four different course contexts: traditional high school English, high school remedial reading, high school Young Adult Literature, and college English. Interview data suggests the participant…