For decades, important early childhood scholars who critiqued normative ideas about early childhood frameworks, guidelines, and assessments have been silenced in highly ranked child development and early childhood journals. The qualitative methods needed to prioritize the perspectives of marginalized communities (i.e., ethnography, interview and…

Background/Context: Considering that the rise in popularity of podcasts as ubiquitous forms of entertainment mirrors a rise in the use of podcasts as curricular texts, this research explores the need for critical listening practices within and beyond the classroom. Specifically, we draw from our overlapping identities as podcast listeners,…

Background/Context: Institutional missions serve many purposes within universities, but most studies focus on how mission points to direction, guidelines, or priorities. However, organizational missions have been shown to have other functions such as instructing members about actions or behaviors that are acceptable. This paper therefore examines…

Background/Context: Sociocultural research on young people's literate practices with digital media has generally focused on literacy events and practices that are grounded in distinct online locations, such as affinity spaces, specific websites, particular videogames, or virtual worlds. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:…

Context/Background: Currently, chances for English learners (ELs) to reach higher education in the United States are slim. Almost half of ELs do not attend postsecondary education (PSE), and access to four-year college is particularly limited, but we do not exactly know why. Purpose: To examine what inhibits ELs' four-year-college access in the…

Background/Context: In the first half of the 20th century, American policy makers at all levels of government, alongside housing and real estate industry figures, crafted mechanisms of racial exclusion that helped to segregate metropolitan residential landscapes. Although educators and historians have recognized the long-term consequences of these…

Background/Context: In the past two decades there have been at least 10 quantitative reviews, syntheses, or meta-analyses focused on literacy interventions in secondary schools. To date, much of this research has focused on quantifiable outcomes such as reading test scores, and few efforts have been made to synthesize studies of adolescent…

Background/Context: Since 2002, U.S. federal funding for educational research has favored the development and rigorous testing of interventions designed to improve student outcomes. However, recent reviews suggest that a large fraction of the programs developed and rigorously tested in the past decade have shown null results on student outcomes…

Background/Context: Prior research overlooks the importance of drawing distinctions within the category of defaulters or "nonchoosers" in schooling choices. Defaulters are both a theoretically and empirically interesting population, and understanding the processes by which families come to or are assigned the default school offers…

Background: Although much is known from educational research about factors that support K-12 teacher professional learning, it has been an ongoing challenge to incorporate these factors into practice in new contexts and environments. We argue that these factors are too often treated like a checklist of discrete elements, either present or not,…

This research reports data from case studies of three intermediary organizations facing the challenge of scaling up teacher learning. The turn of the century launched scaling-up efforts of all three intermediaries, growing from intimate groups, where founding teachers and staff were key supports for teacher learning, to large multistate…

Background: Systems thinking is a holistic approach that puts the study of wholes before that of parts. It does not try to break systems down into parts in order to understand them; instead, it focuses attention on how the parts act together in networks of interactions. Purpose: This study explored the development of holistic school leadership--an…

Background: A growing number of studies argue that data use practices in schools have not sufficiently attended to teachers' learning about students, subject matter, and instruction. The result has been changes in instructional management (e.g., student grouping, assignment of students to tutoring) rather than instructional improvement. Further,…

Background/Context: Educational policy is informed by multiple stakeholders and actors. Research has focused on understanding how policy decisions are informed and made, as well as how teachers and school leaders take up these policies in their practice. However, few researchers have examined how educational policy is framed for the larger public…

Background/Context: This study examines the implementation of an academic and social-emotional learning innovation called Personalization for Academic and Social-Emotional Learning, or PASL. The innovation was designed, tested, and implemented using a continuous continuous-improvement model. The model emphasized a top-and-bottom process in which…