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…

The single-site case study described herein is part of a two-year professional development (PD) initiative aimed at helping teachers from an urban elementary (K-8) school learn how to implement explicit, transactional comprehension strategy instruction across grades using culturally relevant books. This paper describes the urban elementary…

Students belonging to marginalized groups experience positive impacts when taught by a teacher of the same race, ethnicity, and gender. The unique nature of standardized, asynchronous online course taking allows for greater separation of any possible educational benefits of student versus teacher-driven mechanisms contributing to these improved…

Although Black and Latinx students disproportionately face exclusionary school discipline, prior research finds that the likelihood of suspension for Black students decreases when they are taught by greater proportions of Black teachers. Little prior work, however, has examined whether these effects generalize to large, diverse, urban school…

Special education teachers of color are underrepresented in research about attrition and retention, despite evidence of their role in the academic, social, and emotional success of students of color. We used critical quantitative methods and structural equation modeling to investigate the attrition and retention variability between special…

This article investigates the racial and gender dynamics of educational inequality in suburban public schools in the United States during an era of rapid demographic change. As suburban schools transition from predominantly White enclaves to more diverse settings, it is unclear to what extent the popular narrative of "suburban advantage"…

Puerto Rican students are a growing population in U.S. mainland schools, yet few recent studies have focused on the school contextual and identity-based experiences of Puerto Rican youth. Using stage-environment fit and LatCrit theories, this qualitative study examined seven Puerto Rican adolescent students' perspectives on domains of school…

College access programs have been created to provide students of color opportunities to attend college. The Posse Foundation selects promising urban high school students to attend highly selective colleges and universities across the country. College success is dependent on a variety of factors, two of which are successful social and academic…

This study intended to examine factors potentially contributing to teacher retention and attrition at the local (district) level and the costs associated with this teacher movement. A secondary data set from a large urban school district in the southern United States served as the unit of analysis for this study. Demographic data on 25,724…

Math programming that includes assessments to predict standardized mathematics scores can help evaluate student performance and growth during the academic year. ACALETICS® is a highly interactive, culturally inclusive mathematics program that utilizes posttests as continuous comprehensive assessments to evaluate student mathematical knowledge.…

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to understand how principals who lead community schools in New York City make sense of their work and their lived experiences in advancing social justice for their students and school communities particularly during this COVID-19 pandemic. Community schools, by virtue of their design and…

Although Black and Latinx students disproportionately face exclusionary school discipline, prior research finds that the likelihood of suspension for Black students decreases when they are taught by greater proportions of Black teachers. Little prior work, however, has examined whether these effects generalize to large, diverse, urban school…

Some still view arts education as a non-essential extracurricular activity despite its benefits. Even though the Every Student Succeeds Act acknowledges arts education is a healthy and well-rounded subject, local, district, and state administrators still control budget allocation and cuts, which generally affect arts education. There has also been…

Building on youth literacies in formal learning spaces is a promising direction for asset-based literacy learning designs. However, in response to ways that academic spaces can deaden passionate literacy study, it is important to attend to the resulting affective flows of such practices. This study traces how affect was sustained and dampened in a…

A large urban school district wanted to understand how its first-year teacher mentoring program might better support the district goals of increasing retention and maintaining a diverse workforce. This study investigated new teachers' participation in that program; how participation varied across teacher characteristics, especially how…