Background/Context: Literatures on college-going cultures offer patterns and lists of practices that promote schoolwide attention to college-going for nondominant youth, often with organization-level analyses of policies and procedures. Other literature identifies promising practices and challenges to conventional instruction, often examining…

Background/Context: Questions about teacher quality, including how teachers ought to be educated and licensed, rank near the top of the educational agenda in the United States. These controversies persist because of lack of consensus about what "teacher quality" means, conflicting claims about the empirical evidence, and public skepticism about…

Background: The field of higher education abounds with qualitative research aimed at highlighting the needs, struggles, strengths, and motivations of academically struggling students. However, because of the small-scale nature of these studies, they rarely enter the public debate or impact institutional policy concerning access, remediation,…

Background/Context: The achievement gap between students from different backgrounds is an issue of grave concern in the United States and in many other developed countries. U.S. research suggests that tracking and other forms of ability grouping with curriculum differentiation may be implicated in increasing this gap. Unfortunately, U.S.…

This article discusses how parents and teachers view the importance of homework. Study findings indicate that family environment influences successful homework completion. Homework procedures of two families were observed. In the successful situation, the family linked homework with family life, while the other family arranged special time that…

Focus of Study: This article investigates how teachers' relationships with boys can be central in bolstering boys' resilience and connection to their work in schools. Specifically, we examine how teachers understand the ways that their relationships with boys shape their teaching practice as well as their understandings of boys' learning in…

Explains the persistence of inequality between blacks and whites despite changes since 1960, noting why a gap persists in the school performances of the two groups. The article looks at the difference between class stratification and racial stratification and then discusses civil rights, social change, and the educational consequences of racial…

Investigates the informal curriculum of a state-funded after-school dropout prevention program for adolescents. The program's goal is to resocialize them into their schools and enable them to achieve academic success. The paper proposes that the program fails to achieve its goal because of its ideology, and it recommends an alternative perspective…