Guided by the concept of nepantleras and critical race nepantlera methodology, Nancy Acevedo presents the testimonios of Citlalli Bejarano and Natalie Ibarra Collazo, two Chicana students who attend urban high schools. Citlalli and Natalie share various forms of inclusion and exclusion that they experience as Chicanas attending private and public…

Angela Chapman and Allan Feldman (2016) conducted a study that aimed to exam how a group of diverse urban high school students were affected by the participation in a contextually based authentic science experience. The analysis of all data led the authors to conclude that the experience of authentic science positively influenced the science…

This article responds to Henry Tam's article in this issue of FORUM by exploring opportunities for co-operative problem-solving for staff and students of the Royal Docks Community School in the London Borough of Newham. Becoming a co-operative trust helped the school move out of special measures and develop a strategy of participation and…

Research conducted on youth exposure to violence has generally focused on documenting the prevalence of community violence and its emotional and behavioral implications. However, there is a dearth of information related to the impact of violence on the implementation and evaluation of community and school-based programs. This commentary examines…

While mathematics education research has often focused at the level of the classroom (Rousseau Anderson & Tate, 2008), there are emerging calls for attention to shift from individual classrooms to consider the process of reform at the school or district level. Investigating the role of the institution and conditions of the organization becomes…

Previous research has suggested that competitive classroom environments can play a role in perpetuating race and class inequalities. However, classroom competition can also promote learning, and eliminating it could do students a disservice. This paper draws on research literature and data from a qualitative study by Konstantinos Alexakos, Jayson…

It was spring of 2004 when Joe Cytrynbaum interviewed to become the Program Director at Umoja Student Development Corporation in Chicago. Umoja is a weird hybrid of a youth development/educational reform organization. The organization operates from the premise that all sustainable change (for individuals and systems) has to happen in the context…

Less than fifty percent of African American students graduate from high school. Their educational failure is built into the racial structure of curriculum, standardized testing, teacher preparation programs, and even teacher recruitment pathways. "Shut Up and Listen" argues that African American students should be taught to navigate and resist the…

This article presents a poem about Joe Cytrynbaum. The poem brings together all the many facets of Joe's personality into a crystal-clear image of the beautiful, smart, and magnanimous individual Joe's family, friends, students, and colleagues all knew him to be.

Rochelle Gutiérrez has spent 15 years researching effective, urban high school mathematics departments that served Black, Latin@ and low-income adolescents (see, e.g., Gutiérrez, 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002). These were schools where students took more mathematics than was required by their district; where English learners, recent immigrants,…

The author describes her experience as special education teacher at Berkeley High School (BHS), an urban school with over three thousand students, and how she began to question the way the school defines disability. The diversity of any large urban school has its benefits, but the size itself will always be the downfall when the school focuses on…

In this article, the authors provide an overview and critically analyze three successful faculty-developed urban K-12 science outreach programs. They consider a successful outreach program as one that has been sustained for at least five years after initial funding, and has provided empirically-based research findings from the program.…

In a recent study, Kellow and Jones apply the stereotype threat paradigm to a sample of African American students attending an urban high school. The purpose of this commentary is to provide a conceptual and methodological critique of Kellow and Jones's study. Implications for the role of Black psychologists in evaluating research on African…

Believing that accountability could be a vehicle for change, the California Department of Education (CDE) requires all high school students to pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) in order to graduate. In doing so, California joins many others states in mandating a high school exit exam as a current or future requirement for…

For millions of years, human beings evolved and then lived in small social groupings that were intergenerational, with simple divisions of labor, oriented to common tasks and values. It was a limited existence in many ways, but there was community and continuity. And now, very suddenly in evolutionary time, we have built the teeming cities and…