The philosophy of full-service community schools (FSCS) is increasingly infused into the ethos of schools across the nation in Black and Brown communities with purported goals to engage families and address the multifaceted disparities they experience in schools and communities. Limited research explores the experiences of Black families within…

A major concern in engineering education involves ensuring that youth belonging to minoritized groups have equitable access to engineering career pathways. Related research often highlights the effect of student and school characteristics on engineering success but few studies have investigated the engineering-related assets that Black families…

Drawing from the lived experiences of Black parents as they engaged with their children's K-12 schools, this book brings a critical race theory (CRT) analysis to family-school partnerships. The author examines persistent racism and white supremacy at school, Black parents' resistance, and ways school communities can engage in more authentic…

African American families are multidimensional entities that change over time. This is particularly true when there is a child with a disability in the family. The communication and interaction of the family and parents with the teachers and school in which their child receives special education services are of crucial importance. The goal for all…

Black children and their families encounter systemic disadvantages in their journey to and through an autism diagnosis. Black families often experience social and systemic barriers to service use. Providing family-centered, psychoeducational interventions can reduce barriers to service access and utilization for Black families raising autistic…

This History of Education Society Presidential Address primarily utilizes evocative autoethnography and narrative inquiry to convey its main points. It is written in the storytelling tradition of the African American past and analyzes the lives of three generations of Black Mississippians as they navigated life in Jim Crow Mississippi. It…

Family engagement is rapidly shifting from a low-priority recommendation to an integral part of education reform. Research demonstrates evidence that family engagement positively impacts student outcomes, including grades, course rigor, test scores, social skills, and behavior. There is also a consistent relationship between family engagement and…

This research tested a mediation model, examining whether individual differences in mothers' school readiness beliefs influenced home literacy practices and children's later academic achievement among African American (n = 114) and primarily Mexican origin Latina mothers (n = 164) and their children. Mothers of children ages 3-4 years reported…

Building upon literature that has shown that Black students hold definitive beliefs about their teachers' expectations and knowing these notions have impact on Black student achievement, we explore the experiences within a school district where diversity and inclusion efforts have been ongoing. The participants of this study were high-achieving…

Founded by mothers long concerned about the safety and welfare of their Black children, Black Mothers Forum (BMF) is an Arizona-based education advocacy group that responded to the COVID-19 crisis by launching two microschools for Black families in Phoenix, Arizona, in January 2021. BMF partnered with Prenda, a well-known microschool provider, but…

In this manuscript we chart the intersection of dis/ability and Afro-humanity. We propose that Afro-humanity is a contextual paradigm within African-centred ideology that can be applied to explore the ways in which disability may be perceived differently when applying a specific, cultural philosophical lens. We also explore the process of…

The problem that was addressed through this study was the decline in home-to-school partnerships within a local, public, and ethnically diverse middle school (DMS) in the Southeastern United States. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore parents' perspectives on the decline in home-to-school partnerships at a DMS. Using Epstein's six…

Using a critical phenomenological methodology (Salamon, 2018; van Manen, 1990), this study aims to better understand how Black families' perceptions of place shape their physical movement in pursuit of quality schools and educational opportunity in Metro Detroit. By perceptions of place, I refer to the ways in which families think about, feel…

I investigate longitudinal preferences for schools revealed by families' applications to middle and high schools within a large urban school district's universal enrollment system. I find that preferences for schools' racial/ethnic composition are more stable than preferences for quality and proximity to home, even after concurrently controlling…

Conventional scholarship frames parent involvement in schools as crucial for student success, often depicts Black and Brown parents as under-engaged, and implies their increased engagement would lead to the end of racial disparities in education. This study challenges this traditional discourse and introduces the notion of Racial Realist Parent…