Background/Context: Collaboration is increasingly part of teachers' professional learning and continuous improvement of teaching practice. However, there is little exploration of how teachers' racial, gender, and social class identities influence their collaboration with colleagues and, in turn, their teaching and professional learning.…

Background/Context: In-school racial segregation, also called second-generation segregation, is a social dynamic that is manifest in different and complicated ways in schoolhouses across the United States. This study sought to investigate how building-level leadership facilitates or impedes the practice of racial equity in an urban high school,…

Background/Context: High school educational environments find Black males experience systemic racial microaggressions in the form of discipline policies, academic tracking and hegemonic curriculum (Allen, Scott, & Lewis, 2013). Black males in high school are more likely than their White male peers to have high school truancies and be viewed as…

Background: In 1991, Savage Inequalities quickly became the most riveting assessment of the inequalities in U.S. public schools. When Kozol visited East St. Louis for his book, the authors of this paper lived and attended schools there. As Kozol's readers in their respective graduate and undergraduate classes, the authors found it difficult to…

Background/Context: This article considers issues related to the intersection of mental health and education. Typically, in both educational and noneducational settings, atypical mental health conditions are described and treated as "disorders." The author challenges conventional understandings of mental health and how to address it, particularly…

Background/Context: Conducted in the fourth-largest urban center in the United States, this research depicts how different reform initiatives were introduced to one middle school context over the decade from 1999 to 2009. Purposes/Objectives/Research Question/Focus of Study: The study focuses on teachers' experiences of three reform endeavors and…

Background/Context: Teacher preparation programs are built on knowledge, practices, habits of mind, and professional standards that teacher educators (TEs) intend teachers to possess. Some foundations are explicitly manifest in standards, mission statements, and policies, whereas others are embedded in coursework, field experiences, and social…

Background/Context: Within the context of four locally funded research projects, the researcher was asked to disseminate the findings of her narrative inquiries not to the research community, which had previously been the case, but to the practice and philanthropic communities. This, in turn, created a representational crisis because practitioners…

Background/Context: Over the past decade, a growing chorus of educational stakeholders has called for the recruitment of more Black men into the American teaching profession, casting these men as ideal surrogate father figures for Black youth who may lack adult male role models in their families or communities. Although a small body of scholarly…

Background/Context: Meganarratives, or "grand stories," are composed of loosely held ideas about standardization, the rhetoric of education for all, the focus on individual success, and the appearance of representative diversity that rarely take into account human diversity embedded in deeply rooted value systems and authentically…

Background/Context: School closure is becoming an increasingly common policy response to underperforming urban schools. Districts typically justify closure decisions by pointing to schools' low performance on measures required by No Child Left Behind. Closures disproportionately fall on schools with high percentages of poor and working-class…

Background/Context: Over the past 5 years, there has been a growing body of scholarship that examines the intersections of hip-hop culture and classroom pedagogy. Although recent scholarship has persuasively demonstrated the classroom potential of hip-hop texts for promoting student engagement, scaffolding sanctioned forms of knowledge, and…

Background and Context: The context for this study is the American legislative landscape covering the past 35 years, which witnessed a shift in political philosophies concerning the role of government in ensuring the social welfare of its citizens--from a focus on a "safety net" to a focus on "individual responsibility." We frame these contrasting…

Background/Context: Despite recent gains from a number of students in U.S. schools, African American males continue to underachieve on most academic indices. Despite various interventions that have attempted to transform the perennial disenfranchisement, their school failure has persisted. Conversely, their failure in schools frequently results in…

How do children understand the ways that classroom relationships shape their capacity to trust what they know? This article argues that students have remarkable abilities to read the relational tenor of their classrooms and shape their spoken knowledge accordingly. Based on an in-depth study with sixth-grade students, this research demonstrates…