In the wake of the federal government's retrenchment from urban America in the 1970s and 1980s and the resulting rise in inequality, youth-serving, out-of-school time (OST) nonprofits took on a greater role in supporting urban public schools and students. Since then, many educational OST nonprofits have become enriching spaces for youth outside of…

This article relies on nonrepresentational narrative research to consider improvisational urban literacy. The author uses narrative to theorize the choice to teach "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" in urban high school English classrooms. The author positions this decision as the surprising result of an improvisational, urban literacy…

On November 14th, 2022, a group of Black community leaders from the Saint Louis, Missouri, area met to discuss their experiences with the serious issues surrounding urban schools in their communities. Although this discussion is specific to a particular time and place, the concerns expressed, and solutions, offered are transferrable to many other…

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned the "separate but equal" principle promulgated in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Yet, almost 70 years after Brown, schools continue to be segregated, and the structure of the public education system has fostered inequities across the nation. Although…

Background/Context: For over three decades, Jean Anyon produced scholarship that revealed the deep-structural causes of educational inequality. Anyon's work in political economy includes a racial analytic; she argues that access to education does not reduce economic disparities in urban communities of color, and that schools in poor and…