Background/Context: This article explores the experiences of one Mexican American family as they make a key curriculum choice for their 9-year-old son. Relatively little attention has been paid to parents' beliefs, attitudes, and, in particular, experiences as they actively engage in--and sometimes affect--their children's schooling. Parents'…

Background: Cumulatively, research indicates that teachers who are emotionally supportive and create positive classroom climates influence the outcomes of at-risk students in nontrivial ways. Prior research has also established that teacher behaviors that support autonomy, provide higher level thinking opportunities, and value students' social and…

Background/Context: Researchers have found that school districts with greater representation of Latinos and African Americans on their school boards tend to also have higher percentages of Latino and African American administrators and teachers. This increased presence of coethnics in the educational bureaucracy was then found to predict more…

Background/Context: While different instructional approaches have been proposed to integrate academic content and English proficiency for English language learning (ELL) students, studies examining the magnitude of the relationship are non-existent. This study examined the relationship between the "form" (i.e., conventions, organization, and…

Background/Context: How do we account for the persistence of below-average math test score performance among California Hispanics who are fluent in English, as well as Spanish-dominant English learners? Recent studies have attributed the problem to an overly rigid focus on "what works" in curriculum and fluency in English to the…

Background/Context: As accountability pressures have mounted toward ever-higher targets under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, low-achieving schools have sought new tools for raising achievement. The association between parent involvement and student achievement is well established, though the association is an indirect relationship mediated…

Background/Context: Brown v Board of Education fundamentally changed our nation's schools, yet we know surprisingly little about how and whether they provide equality of educational opportunity. Although substantial evidence suggests that African American and Latino students who attend these schools face fewer learning opportunities than their…

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: In this article, we explore the life histories of two Latino/a prospective elementary teachers in a large Midwestern university; examine their knowledge, strengths, and needs as teachers; and consider how teacher educators might capitalize on these. We explore how these prospective teachers' prior family, home, K-12 schooling,…

Background:This study grew out of a recent Supreme Court case known as "Horne v Flores." The case began in 1992 in Nogales, Arizona when a 4th grade English learner (EL), Miriam Flores, sued the district and the state for failing to provide her (and other EL students) with an appropriate education as guaranteed by the Equal Educational…

Background/Context: For the last 40 years, researchers have posited competing theories regarding the relative influence of social class background and racial-group membership on the school experiences, academic performance, behavior, and motivation of ethnic minority students. The general purpose of these competing theories has been to explain why…

This article reports on a two-year qualitative, practitioner-research study of teaching and learning for social justice. The site was my middle-school mathematics classroom in a Chicago public school in a Latino/a community. A major pedagogical goal was to create conditions for students to develop agency, a sense of themselves as subjects in the…

Background: The call to recruit and retain teachers of color in urban high-minority schools is based on an assumption of a cultural match with students. Yet new teachers of color may find themselves challenged by students with whom they are supposedly culturally matched. Although past research has examined recruitment, preservice, and veteran…

Background/Context: The United States is becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly racially isolated across race-ethnic boundaries. Researchers have argued that both diversity and racial isolation serve to undermine the social cohesion needed to bind American citizens to one another and to society at large. Focus of…

Background/Context: Perpetuation theory predicts that attending a racially segregated school paves the way for a lifetime of segregated experiences in neighborhoods, schools, and jobs. Research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s linked racial isolation in high schools with later racial isolation in many social settings among African-American…