This paper explores how school community collaboration is given meaning by municipally employed coordinators whose task is to organise collaboration between schools and other actors in urban areas in Sweden. Inspired by Carol Bacchi's theorisation of the constitutive aspect of discerning problems, it examines how coordinators give meaning to the…

Despite the widely recognized effectiveness of place-based education (PBE) by researchers in the science education community, there is a lack of resources and curriculum appropriate for the environment of urban schools. Unequal access to quality science curriculum materials is an ongoing issue facing urban schools in the United States. This basic…

Despite rich and growing school choice and school marketing literatures, little is known about if and how principals of zoned public elementary schools engage in marketing. We address this gap by drawing on in-depth interviews with principals of nine schools--in different neighborhoods--in the Baltimore school district. We find that principals…

Many district and school leaders have leveraged instructional leadership or social justice leadership to advance student achievement for minoritized students. While research has examined these approaches separately, we identify a potential gap at the nexus between instructional and social justice leadership. In particular, we find a need for…

The purpose of this study, through an analysis of the literature review of general scholars in the field of school poverty, equity, efficiency, and student achievement results, was to determine whether economic disparity had a direct statistical significance to student achievement gaps. Specifically, identification of the five socioeconomic tiers…

This action research project explores the current university-community school-based partnerships between Paterson community organizations and WU. This study's research question is, "What current university-community school-based partnerships exist between the Paterson community organizations and WU?" This study uses only the first action…

School leaders juggle the often-inconsistent goals of maintaining support of middle- and upper-income families for public education and, at the same time, implementing policies to strengthen equity for low-income students. Author Iris C. Rotberg describes how these tradeoffs play out in different communities, the role of concentrated poverty and…

Growing emphasis on elementary STEM education has pushed elementary teachers to face curriculum changes that focus on standards with which they are largely unfamiliar (Smith, 2020; Trygstad et al., 2013). As a result, elementary students are not always exposed to STEM subjects or integration and miss out on opportunities to access and enjoy the…

Civic science (CS) is an approach to science learning and action in which youth determine issues of concern in their communities and use science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) knowledge and methods to address them. In this article, we focus on CS as it is applied to environmental concerns and enacted by children and youth in urban…

Educators across the U.S. struggle to provide an equitable education to their diverse students. Since the 2020 COVID pandemic and the national call to end racism after George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, chronic absenteeism and students' substantial mental health challenges have disrupted their efforts. Schools have struggled more than ever to…

This paper is premised on the understanding that racism is deeply and widely entrenched in our culture and the ethical claim that we operate within complex networks of habituated practices. Within this framework, we ask how do we disrupt these calcified, complex, and racist ways of being? Specifically, we explore how teachers are habituated into…

We present analyses from focus group interviews with a geographically diverse set of experienced, urban teachers who point to "systemic inequity" as a major contributing factor to the problems they face in their schools and communities. To begin, we overview the literature relating to our development of this project, after which we…

The movie "Try Harder!" features a group of students at Lowell High School in San Francisco, California, as they navigate their elite public institution and apply to top-tier universities. A critical analysis of this film allows us to understand new trends and emerging discourses in urban cities, showing the way racialized groups are pit…

This article provides a review of prior empirical work exploring whether and to what extent school district racial composition affects the costs associated with providing equal educational opportunity to achieve a common set of outcomes. This prior work mainly involves education cost function modeling, on several specific states and in an earlier…

Background: Research shows that serving as an assistant principal is a typical steppingstone to the principalship (Folsom et al., 2015; Goldring et al., 2021; Hitt & Player, 2019; Osborne-Lampkin & Folsom, 2017) and assistant principals serve important leadership roles in schools, supporting principals and teachers (Marshall & Hooley,…