This article describes the cultural characteristics of four elite African American high schools, initiated prior to Brown v. Board of Education, that produced outstanding graduates. Positive school culture characteristics examined were leadership, faculty, curriculum and instruction, student qualities, the environment, and internal and external…

In 2012, Denver Public School District superintendent Tom Boasberg wrote to his employees about the state of their schools: "Yet there's a great deal of work ahead because our gaps still aren't closing at all. They remain strikingly and distressingly similar to the national data. Our schools still aren't the equalizing force that they need to…

In this historical examination, Amato Nocera, Kyle P. Steele, and John Hensley argue that the development of Black rural high schools in the decades leading up to the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision represented the dynamic between standardization, white supremacy, and Black self-definition that has shaped US education reform.…

Extant research has shown that students do better academically and socially when they are in schooling environments that are racially and socioeconomically diverse (Coleman, 1966). To date, there is very limited research which has examined the development of adolescents' racial, ethnic, and social identities within the contemporary contexts of…

This research considers how Mexican American history becomes part of the curricular canon, and what their inclusion tells us about popular conceptions of Mexican Americans. At a time of increasing presence of Latina/o students in K-12 classrooms, it is important to consider how we depict their experiences in U.S. history. To address this concern,…

While segregation in public schools was found unconstitutional in the "Brown v. Board" of Education of Topeka Kansas case in 1954, many present day African American students still attend segregated schools. Within these "de facto" segregated schools, students meet challenges to educational achievement. In a sample of 160…

Sixty years have passed since the pivotal 1954 Supreme Court case of "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" and almost fifty years have elapsed since the Higher Education Act of 1965. The Brown decision dismantled public segregated schools in many parts of the country, especially in the South, and racial access in schools…