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…

We use the metaphor of building a plane while flying to describe the enactment of educational policies by teachers during COVID-19 and the impact of these policies on their ability to meet the needs of their students. Drawing from a series of three one-hour focus groups with seven teachers in Alberta, we apply critical policy analysis to describe…

This article was developed from Michael Corbett's 2020 Rural Education Special Interest Group (SIG) Career Achievement Award Lecture. There has been an encouraging influx of new work, both in the United States and in other anglophone settler societies, as well as in Europe in the emerging field of rural education, influenced by developments in…

Since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in March 2020, districts across the nation have faced the difficult task of reopening school sites safely for in-person instruction and keeping them open as community infection rates have risen and fallen. It is useful to learn from the efforts of districts that have been able to reopen schools--and keep them…

The case explores the challenges of school leaders to facilitate social justice-based reforms for low-income students of color who attend underperforming schools. In particular, it examines the 1st-year experiences of Principal Yolanda Lopez at Kennedy High School, an underperforming and underresourced urban public high school. Lopez is tasked…

This article describes a case study of dual language bilingual education (DLBE) that challenges the model's traditional mold while offering important insights into its utility for communities of less commonly taught languages. We begin with an outline of the expansion of DLBE in New York City, part of a broader national trend. We then explore a…

Displacing the largest number of refugees in recent time is one of the devastating impacts of the Syrian war. Turkey hosts over 3.6 million Syrian refugees. Almost half of them are children in the preschool or primary school stage. Because refugee children are five times more likely to miss schooling than nonrefugee children, the provision of…

Through powerful narratives of parents of Black and Latinx students with disabilities, this book provides a unique look at the relationship between disability, race, urban space, and market-driven educational policies. Offering significant insights into complex forms of educational exclusion, the text illustrates the actual challenges and…

An urban middle school goes through the transformation of becoming a university-supported lab school. Drawing upon design thinking principles, the planning team cultivates a sense of shared empathy, creative problem-solving, and an ethos of curiosity and learning in a collaborative environment.

Child maltreatment (CM) is a serious and prevalent public health problem in the United States (U.S.) yet programming to combat the issue often overlooks high school aged youth (those aged 14-17). In 2017, over 90,000 youth in the U.S. experienced CM during their high school years (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2019). This manuscript…

This article examines how the outcome of neoliberal educational reforms has affected urban schooling in the inner city of Stockholm--making it into a centralized nexus or a 'hot-spot' for students and schools. The aim is to analyse how geographical place and space have become major distinctive criteria in inner-city students' educational…

"Children at the Center" provides a closely observed account of a decade-long effort to reshape the scope, direction, and quality of the Boston Public Schools' early childhood programs. Drawing on multiple perspectives and voices from the field, the authors highlight the reflective, collaborative, inquiry-driven approach undertaken by…

This case study explores the utility of Expectancy Value Theory (EVT) as a framework for studying elementary teachers' beliefs and motivations with respect to reformed mathematics instruction. A model for coding and evaluating qualitative data using EVT is proposed and illustrated using interviews with three primary school teachers in an urban…

This study investigated the factors that pushed and pulled social justice educators out of urban elementary and secondary (K-12) schools and into teacher education. The authors utilized an autoethnography and counternarrative methodology to examine the systemic and distinct factors that impacted four social justice educators' decisions to leave…

Societal stories about school do not just reflect our current views and values, they also shape our political preferences and the realities that result from them. In recent decades, stories of the traditional common school and its more collectivist, shared culture have given way to newer stories oriented around competition and choice. Sarah…