Through an ethnographic case study within one struggling Afrocentric public charter school in the Mid-Atlantic from 2009 to 2011, I show how broader neoliberal reforms and an incomplete attempt at Afrocentric education combined to redefine Blackness as poverty, danger, and failure through the co-optation of school-based practices. Using a Critical…

Silent, single-file lines. Detention for putting a head on a desk. Rules for how to dress, how to applaud, how to complete homework. Walk into some of the most acclaimed urban schools today and you will find similar recipes of behavior, designed to support student achievement. But what do these "scripts" accomplish? Immersing readers…

America has a long history of small-school environments, such as one-room schoolhouses and homeschools. But in recent years, other models have developed, giving students more intimate settings for learning and enabling their families to play a larger role in their schooling. Microschools are a leading example of this growing sector that also…

The privatization of public funds for education through school choice programs has fueled the expansion of virtual online charter schools. This redirection of funds contributes to the idea that virtual school success is comparable or even superior to the performance of traditional public schools. The schools most adversely affected are the schools…

Virtual learning and personalized learning have been at the forefront of education reform discussions for over a decade. Backed by almost $200 million philanthropic dollars from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the Gates Foundation, and others, Summit Public Schools has aggressively marketed its Summit Learning Platform to schools across the United…

School principals often contend that having the ability to be the instructional leaders that they were trained to be hinges in part upon maximizing their decision making latitude. These leaders assert that policy flexibility allows schools to make necessary changes without the bureaucracy that they believe stifles reform, improvement strategies,…

In March 2020, the coronavirus shuttered schools across the United States and the world. In the first year of the pandemic, school systems faced difficult decisions about how to deliver instruction while maintaining the safety and wellbeing of students, families, faculty, and staff. As the months passed, the consequences from this public health…

This article examines charter school reform in the midst of gentrifying urban spaces and documents, through extant research and the findings from our research, the role of school choice in perpetuating school segregation in racially diverse neighborhoods. We argue that 65 years after "Brown v. Board of Education," the more the specific…

Can schools that boost student outcomes reproduce their success at new campuses? We study a policy reform that allowed effective charter schools in Boston, Massachusetts to replicate their school models at new locations. Estimates based on randomized admission lotteries show that replication charter schools generate large achievement gains on par…

Using New Orleans as a site of analysis, this article provides a critical race theory reading of a little studied policy mechanism, the charter school application and authorization process. Embedded and competing narratives within charter school applications are analyzed. The authorization process is the central gatekeeping mechanism in the…

Microschools, small schools that educate five to 15 students, have been among the most interesting recent developments in the K-12 reform world. Neither homeschooling nor traditional schooling, they exist in a hard-to-classify space between formal and informal learning environments. One of the most prominent microschooling networks, Prenda, was…

This article aims to demonstrate the hazards of an education system controlled by any one group -- in this case, governments -- by examining the recent drive for the academisation of English state schools. This article highlights the need for education's independence from political control. The once 'secret garden' of the curriculum is now firmly…

This paper examines the organisational culture of a comprehensive school that converted to an academy in 2010 by utilising the cultural web model as a tool for analysing an academy's culture. The case study employs a concurrent mixed-method approach of questionnaires for staff with no responsibility (SNR), focus groups for staff with management…

Much of the public discussion of Catholic schools has focused on their students' performance but ignores the values that have always supported them. Thirty-five years ago, the experiences and successes of Catholic schools in low-income American communities began to inform a significant part of what came to be called the school reform movement. The…

This article analyses the narratives and counter-narratives which characterised the struggle between the Chicago Public School Board (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers' Union (CTU) preceding the 2019 Chicago teachers' strike. This was an extraordinary event which has received little scholarly attention. The paper explores the types and uses of the…