This article examines everyday disciplinary practices in three kindergarten classrooms and their role in identity construction. Taking a "figured worlds" perspective, I show how racialized and ableist discourses mediated processes of surveillance, escalation, and physical restraint, leading educators to disproportionately position Black…

This qualitative case study investigated how an early childhood teacher and young children in a public White-predominant kindergarten classroom engaged in critical discussions of anti-bias issues including racism, White privilege, gender stereotypes, gender nonconformity, sexism, and homophobia. Through the use of interactive read-alouds using…

Amidst the increased demand for social justice throughout the United States, Carolyn Stoughton, a teacher in a midwestern school district, developed and taught curriculum on gender stereotypes and racial injustice to 2nd-grade students. She received messages from families suggesting her curriculum was inappropriate, pushing an agenda, and…

Many kindergarten teachers use ability groups to differentiate instruction in reading and math. Ability group placement should depend primarily on student achievement, but critics charge that placement is biased by socioeconomic status (SES), gender, and race/ethnicity. We predict group placement in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of the…

The term the "female advantage" is commonly used to describe gender inequalities in education, including in early childhood. This study seeks to problematize this idea by including the intersection of children's race and gender. This article examines race and gender disparities in teachers' perceptions of children's problem behaviors and…

Teaching in early care and education (ECE) programs is one of the lowest-paid occupations in the United States. Low wages for early educators are not a new challenge. Compensation has been low in this field since its inception, but only recently have the public, policymakers, and other stakeholders begun to appreciate the full ramifications of…

Drawing on a 3-year interpretive study that followed a cohort of children from prekindergarten to Grade 1, this article presents results of a multiple case study, which demonstrated that although two children had the same teachers, classmates, and curricula over 3 years, their experiences in the three successive mathematics classrooms were quite…

"Strong Black Girls" lays bare the harm Black women and girls are expected to overcome in order to receive an education in America. This edited volume amplifies the routinely muffled voices and experiences of Black women and girls in schools through storytelling, essays, letters, and poetry. The authors make clear that the strength of…

The purposes of this study were to examine the diversity of the authors and illustrators in core reading series and to evaluate the opportunities and limitations of these texts in relation to the goals of multicultural education. The authors began their research concerned about whose stories are told in core reading series, and who gets to tell…

This is the first in a series of booklists drawn from recommendations by State and National Teachers of the Year and Finalists for State Teacher of the Year. This booklist is a resource for educators, parents, community members, and policy makers interested in reaching young people on issues of social justice. The collection of more than 200 books…

This study focuses on a recording from a week of third-grade classroom sessions. The recording was used to train new teachers in a certification program and provided data for a learning community that was studying classroom discourse. The third-grade teacher was described as being "outstanding" and "culturally responsive" by…

Drawing from an ethnographic study on Mexican immigrant fathers and their second-grade children, this article examines the masked realities behind current immigration policies that equate "illegal" with "Mexican immigrant" and how the enforcement of these policies, which overwhelmingly target Mexican immigrant men, affect…

This study provides a critical look at achievement of African American (AA), and Latino (L) females in third and fifth grades on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) in reading, mathematics and science. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the 2007 and 2011 TAKS raw data. Data analyses indicate that AAL females had the lowest…

Previous research has established that student learning is influenced by how accurately teachers perceive student academic ability. But studies rarely investigate the degree to which inaccuracies in teacher perceptions exacerbate demographic inequality in academic ability. Using a sample of almost 14,000 children from the Early Childhood…