Background: Public education reforms, such as expanded school choice, have become a critical lever for remaking urban landscapes. These reforms often aim to attract and retain affluent and White families in urban schools, so scholars have examined how these parents navigate the perceived risk of choosing these schools for their children. Purpose:…

This study investigated the impact of a course-based community asset mapping (CAM) project on undergraduate students' capacity for identifying and understanding assets within communities surrounding specific schools. The mapping project was grounded in the literature on culturally sustaining pedagogy and experiential education and involved teacher…

Folklife, a type of inquiry that focuses on "ways of life" as its central lens, is constantly changing. Rather than focus on cultural loss or salvaging, folklife inquiry is more powerful when it is positioned to offer insights about human experience through the sharing of personal lived histories in safe and supportive environments. At…

While spring of 2020 introduced virtual instruction to all public schools, virtual schooling had already been growing in most states. We focus on pre-COVID-19 changes to fulltime virtual school enrollment in public schools, and provide evidence on the relationship between virtual school enrollment, internet speed, community demographics, and…

Background: As the COVID-19 pandemic spread, school district administrators in the United States were faced with difficult decisions regarding the implementation of virtual or in-person learning to reduce risk of infection throughout student and staff populations. While a coordinated effort with surrounding districts would be most beneficial when…

Rural communities around the United States are facing a critical shortage of teachers due largely to challenges with recruitment and retention. Our vision for responding to this growing crisis is to consider how technology-rich early rural field experiences that emphasize "place-attentive" technology integration can build preservice…

We use data from the applications North Carolina public school districts and charter schools submitted for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) to investigate the sense that educational leaders made of the pandemic as it unfolded. LEAs understood the pandemic as a multifaceted problem. Nearly all applications addressed four…

Purpose: This study examines the expansion of two-way dual language (TWDL) programs in Los Angeles Unified School District from 2000 to 2022, analyzing their growth in relation to neighborhood change, charter school expansion, and enrollment decline. We use a novel data set combining program founding years, school-level enrollments, and…

This project contributes to the understanding and support of the social and academic development of racialised, minoritized students using criteria grounded in community goals and standards for their children. Results are from a 2-year case study of a Children's Defence Fund-sponsored Freedom School (FS) in the US that engaged in critical…

Media reports suggest that parent frustration with COVID school policies and the growing politicization of education have increased community engagement with local public schools. However, there is no evidence to date on whether these factors have translated into greater engagement at the ballot box. This paper uses a novel data set to explore how…

Civic engagement is recognized as a critical process to address environmental and other societal issues. To examine the intersection between environmental education and civic engagement, as reported in the peer-reviewed literature, we undertook a systematic mixed studies review to identify environmental education program outcomes related to civic…

The transformation of teacher education programs is needed. To be authentic and sustainable, efforts at transformation need to be grounded in shifting power and policy making away from just the university to shared decision making among stakeholders. This paper examines what are seen as first steps towards this objective. The effort described here…

This paper, by a Bangladeshi and a New Zealander, brings together narrative inquiry studies of the leadership initiatives in two quite different rural schools, in Bangladesh and New Zealand respectively. The schools are in communities that might be considered as significantly underprivileged, and generationally alienated from education, within…

Schools located in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods report disproportionately high rates of crime and violence. Theoretical reasoning suggests that school-based parent participation may lead to improved school safety in these settings, but little empirical work has tested this relationship. This study examines the relationship between…

Over the past two decades homeschooling has become increasingly popular, but this educational alternative has lacked rigorous empirical evaluation because of data limitations. Since little data are available for individual students, we examine homeschooling participation at the statewide and district level in Wisconsin. The most compelling finding…