This study explores the impact of attending optional professional learning events on the critical consciousness development of Ready to Learn (RtL) mentors over the course of one program year. Ready to Learn is an out of school time math tutoring and mentoring program that seeks to address opportunity gaps in math learning for middle school…

This article explores how one urban high school under threat of state closure developed a multifaceted literacy program to transform the teaching and learning of literacy in a novel university/school partnership. Analyses of ethnographic and quantitative school data illustrate how the evolution of the literacy program could be understood as a…

This study examined 10 urban middle school teachers' practices to motivate their emergent bilingual students (or English-language learners) and the ways in which their practices were associated with their positioning of their students in reading intervention classrooms. Our findings showed that teacher positioning that afforded or constrained…

With this dissertation I present a self-narrative autoethnography to share the pedagogical practices that have been found to be successful in the academic achievement of mathematics with a specific sector of Students of Color, Black/African American students, in the urban inner-city schools. A combination of self reflected teaching experiences in…

This article provides an account of the ways in which students and adult supporters of an urban turnaround high school mobilized to defy the rhetoric of neoliberal reforms and the subsequent deficit narrative imposed on them and on their school. Their counternarratives refute the master narratives advanced by federal and state educational reforms.…

Students from urban high schools are usually faced with adverse environmental factors in their pursuit of academic success. These factors make learning more challenging and may confound the measurement of academic performance itself. This study explores how one such factor, ambient noise, affects the measurement of mathematics achievement.…

We conduct descriptive and inferential analyses of publicly available Common Core of Data (CCD) to examine segregation at the local, state, and national levels. Nationally, we find that higher percentages of charter students of every race attend intensely segregated schools. The highest levels of racial isolation are at the primary level for…

This article reports findings from a quasi-experimental study of the impact of a summer robotics program for urban middle-grade students. The study focuses on student engagement, measured by school attendance rate the year following the program. Program students, who were nearly all low-income minority students, were matched to comparison students…

Over the years, the nation's large urban school districts have consistently learned from the progress of their peer districts across the country. Great City School districts that have embraced the challenge of educating America's urban children have recognized the value of benchmarking their performance and growth against the progress of others.…

In this article, I analyze the formation of Shearwater High School in St. Louis, Missouri and I explore the identity work involved in building the school. Diverging from standardization trends in urban education, the school came to fruition through a creative process, which was in-flux and supported by diverse communities in St. Louis. This…

Drawing on field research carried out on Istanbul school geography, this paper analyzes the co-constitutive relationship between school spaces and urban transformation in Istanbul, the largest city in Turkey. Following a brief discussion of its theoretical framework, the paper describes how relocation of Istanbul inner-city public schools has…

Drawing insights primarily from Ethnic Studies, this essay is broken into the following components: outlining the elusive task of defining urban; delineating three decolonizing moves in relation to representation, structure, and affect; and ending with the ongoing struggles for Ethnic Studies in PK-12 schools and higher education. The goal is to…

One urban district administered the Black Male Teacher Environment Survey (BMTES) to each of its Black male teachers to measure their school-based experiences. This article highlights descriptive statistics from the 86 Black male teacher respondents. Findings suggest that participants' background characteristics and school-based experiences varied…

Social justice, ensuring that all students receive access to equitable educational resources and opportunities to succeed academically, is a guiding principle for school counselors. With this ideal in mind, specific sociocultural factors that affect the academic achievement of African American students in urban school settings are considered.…

For approximately 50 years, music education scholars have purported the need for more diversity training among preservice music teachers. This call has become increasingly urgent as contemporary preservice music teachers encounter the most ethnically and culturally diverse classrooms in public school history. Although preservice music teachers may…