Since 1980, Chicago's United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) has been a major player in school reform, organising Mexican-American communities to build a neighbourhood high school, founding a local technical institute, passing radical school governance reform, and launching a major charter network. At UNO's apex in 2013, a corruption scandal…

Departing from mainstream accounts of the post-Katrina New Orleans state takeover and the more recent "unification" of schools under local governance, this case study utilizes the plantation (Hartman, 1997; Woods, 1998, McKittrick, 2011) as a theoretical device and the silenced archive (Trouillot, 2015) as a method of inquiry to better…

On the surface, this trickle-down view of educational change--what T. Nichols calls "innovation-from-above"--makes sense. Teachers learn about new devices, apps, teaching techniques, and leadership strategies as they show up in articles, reports, and other professional resources, or after they have already been implemented elsewhere.…

This qualitative study examined what middle school and high school suburban and urban principals learned about equity and educating low socioeconomic status students during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, this study asked: What issues of equity were revealed, exacerbated, diminished, or resolved as a result of the pandemic? What key…

Leadership is a critical component of creating and sustaining a school culture that promotes the inclusion and success of students. The purpose of this study was to examine how school leaders helped to enact and sustain a reformed Advanced Placement (AP) culture designed to increase participation and success of students of color. Building on…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine data use practices within a cross-sector initiative involving high school career academies. It discerns how partners used data to assess the public value of academies and address equity concerns. Design/methodology/approach: A case study methodology was applied to examine cross-sector activities…

The widespread expansion of school choice policies has bolstered the consumer-education paradigm where parents compete for what they perceive to be a limited number of high quality schools. In this comparative case study, we examine advantaged White parents' perceptions of meritocracy in the context of a competitive elementary and high school…

"STEM Education Reform in Urban High Schools" gives a nuanced view of the obstacles marginalized students face in STEM education--and explores how schools can better support STEM learners. Reporting the results of a nine-year ethnographic study, the book chronicles the outcomes of various STEM education reforms in eight public high…

Purpose: This study analyzed leadership structures, processes, and practices that have enabled and constrained an ambitious career and college readiness reform within an urban school district. It was designed to discern how leaders worked across cross-sector boundaries to support district-wide high school career academy implementation. Research…

Purpose: This paper explores how leaders of new public high schools -- one charter and two innovation schools -- navigated the journey from school-in-theory to school-in-practice during the school's first three years. School leaders at charter and innovation schools have increased freedom over curriculum, budget, scheduling and personnel when…

This case study explores policy implementation of a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-focused charter school over a three-year period. Gateway Science Academy of St. Louis (GSA), a K-12 district, has applied the STEM-focused curriculum model for seven years. This case study uses the Fullan Change Theory's seven core…

The Every Student Succeeds Act redefines the priorities of our nation's education system. Prior to its passage, turnaround strategies advanced solutions for low-performing schools. Research literature examining how these reforms impacted the schooling experiences of students attending these schools is lacking. We present the results of a…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the possibility of a relationship between second-order change leadership behaviors of high school administrators and changes in student achievement on the Florida Standards Assessment English Language Arts/Reading component and the Algebra 1 End of Course examination in two large urban school districts.…

This article provides an account of the ways in which students and adult supporters of an urban turnaround high school mobilized to defy the rhetoric of neoliberal reforms and the subsequent deficit narrative imposed on them and on their school. Their counternarratives refute the master narratives advanced by federal and state educational reforms.…

Background: For decades, public education, particularly in urban communities, has failed to ensure students of color are able to experience sustained academic success. As a result, campuses within these communities often find themselves vacillating between impending school improvement reforms and short-lived school improvements, only to return to…