bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Racial Disparities and Discrimination in Education: What Do We know, how Do We Know It, and What Do We Need to Know?
Authors: Farkas George
Published: February 2022

This paper reviews what we have learned about racial discrepancies in education, with particular attention to those that might be attributable to discrimination. Empirical studies have found that, on average, African American, Latino, and American Indian children arrive at kindergarten or first grade with lower levels of oral language, prereading, and premathematics skills, as well as lesser general knowledge, than that possessed by White and Asian American children. African American, Latino, and American Indian children are also reported to display behaviors less well suited to the school's learning environment. It has been estimated that at least half, and probably more, of the Black-White gap in twelfth-grade academic achievement would be eliminated if we could eliminate the Black-White performance gap at school entry. The remainder of the performance gap occurs during grades one through twelve. It is here that researchers have looked for discrimination by teachers and school administrators. In particular, they have looked for curricular track placements that, adjusting for prior performance, are disadvantageous for ethnic minority students. They have also looked for the possibility that teachers hold lower expectations for, and are less encouraging to, minority students. The evidence on these matters is mixed. It is suggested that, with the cooperation of school administrators and teachers, district-specific studies of these issues might be undertaken, using both local administrative data and participant-observational methods.
Focusing New Teachers on Individual and Low Performing Students: The Centrality of Formative Assessment in the Mentor's Repertoire of Practice
Authors: Athanases Steven Z. , Achinstein Betty
Published: February 2022

Mentoring novice teachers often features buddy support, technical advice, and classroom management tips to meet teacher-centered concerns of survival. Such mentoring aligns with conventional models of teacher development that describe the novice concerned with self-image, materials and procedures, and management, and only after the initial years, able to focus on individual student learning. Drawing on the wisdom of practice of 37 experienced teacher induction leaders and case studies of mentor/new teacher pairs, this study found that mentors can interrupt that tendency among new teachers, focusing them on the learning of individual students, especially those underperforming. For this work, mentors tap knowledge of student and teacher learners, pedagogy for classrooms and for tutoring teachers, and especially multi-layered knowledge and abilities in several domains of assessment. These include assessment of students, alignment of curriculum with standards, and formative assessment of the new teacher. Skillful use of this knowledge can bring individual student learning into focus and help new teachers generate methods for shaping instruction to meet students’ varied learning needs. These results challenge developmental models of teaching and conservative mentoring practices, calling for articulation of a knowledge base and relevant mentor development to focus new teachers early on individual student learning.
Networking for Teacher Learning: Toward a Theory of Effective Design
Authors: Mcdonald Joseph P. , Klein Emily J.
Published: February 2022

This article focuses on one theory of school reform that seeks to counteract insularity among teachers with respect to questions of what to teach and how. It networks teachers across schools and gives them access to outside expertise in their content areas. In this approach teacher learning happens within a series of face-to-face and virtual meetings, sometimes over many years. In this article, we focus on teacher networking and, more specifically, on how teacher networks design for teacher learning. By describing several dynamic tensions inherent in the designs of a sample of teacher networks, and by raising questions about these tensions and their relation to teacher learning, we hope to contribute toward the building of a theory of effective network design. We illustrate these design concepts with references to the work of seven networks that aim to revamp teachers’ knowledge in the humanities. In the final section of the article, we offer several sets of questions that derive from our analysis and that might form the basis for further research.
Staying Close to the Teacher
Authors: Silin Jonathan G. , Schwartz Fran
Published: February 2022

Although the critical role of teachers in curricular reform is well documented, there has been less focus on how the messiness of life in schools affects the daily work of change agents. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected over a 5-year period, we argue that in troubled urban school districts, teacher buy-in to curricular reform is best achieved when change agents adapt their program to the daily needs and problems of classroom teachers. We look in detail at how staff developers help teachers generate strategies for reading and dealing effectively with district demands, so they can simultaneously fulfill official directives and implement progressive classroom practices. Staff developers enable teachers to function as street-level bureaucrats, who then determine how policy will come to life in their classrooms. In turn staff developers learn to read resistance as a form of communicative action to be interpreted rather than a roadblock to be overcome. Finally, we identify three roles—strategist, translator, and advocate—that staff developers play when working with teachers to create the orderly and coherent classrooms children need to learn and thrive.
Education for Global Understanding: Learning from Dewey's Visit to Japan
Authors: Saito Naoko
Published: February 2022

This article examines the implications of John Dewey's democratic philosophy for contemporary education for global understanding. Its special focus is on his idea of mutual learning through difference—a democratic principle that was put to the test in his own cross-cultural encounter with Japan in 1919. Using Dewey's difficult experience in Japan as a context, I then consider how contemporary Japanese education can best engage with a philosophical question he left, a question involving the difficulty of understanding the different in the absence of common ground. I present various examples that show Japan must face anew the challenge of Deweyan democracy. In exploring certain educational implications, I argue that the age of value diversity and globalization calls for the wisdom of Deweyan pragmatism—a philosophy for a middle way of living, somewhere between resignation to the absence of common ground and belief in an absolute common ground. Dewey's idea of mutual learning based on friendship invites teachers and students to be engaged in translating different ways of language and thinking in the classroom in search of common ground. This approach to education struggles to cultivate open-mindedness toward radical otherness.
Challenges and Opportunities for Higher Education
Authors: Mccroskey Jacquelyn
Published: February 2022

The builders of the modern university expected that the research conducted within it would solve moral problems. The research would provide authoritative instruction on how to live and how to shape a more perfect society. But within a generation, it became clear that this expectation would not easily be fulfilled. Indeed, many of the faculties housed in these new universities were ready to wash their hands of moral concerns. The university faced a crisis: Did it serve to advance morality? And if so, how? The success of the university in producing knowledge and training skilled professionals has compensated for and masked the moral crisis. But nonetheless, the problem of morality continues to plague American higher education. Universities have been unable either to fully incorporate morality or to comfortably abandon a moral mission. This is the unresolved legacy of the creation of the modern research university. (Reuben, 2000, pp. 72–73)
Case Studies —Why and How
Authors: Broudy Harry S.
Published: February 2022

Harry Broudy argues that the persistent criticism of teachers and of teacher education programs is due in part to the absence of a “consensus of the learned” about how teachers should be educated. Broudy's position is that a working consensus could be established through a case-study method in teacher education if cases were developed to portray important problems identified by teachers as typical and recurrent in their professional practice. Such case study, in Broudy's view, would develop prospective teachers' abilities to bring educational theory and research to bear in interpreting perennial problems and exploring alternative solutions to them.
Educational Psychology as a Foundation in Teacher Education: Reforming an Old Notion
Authors: Peterson Penelope L. , Clark Christopher M. , Dickson W. Patrick
Published: February 2022

In this article, the authors raise questions about the place and form of educational psychology in the larger conversation about the thoughtful preparation of teachers. Recent research and theory in cognition and instruction suggest alternatives to traditional concepts of the learner, the teacher, and classroom learning. This research has implications for the reconsideration of the content, curriculum, and methods of teaching educational psychology and also for the ways in which teacher educators learn to teach the adults who will become tomorrow's teachers.
Classroom Knowledge as a Foundation for Teaching
Authors: Doyle Walter
Published: February 2022

Classroom knowledge provides a framework for understanding how classroom systems work and how curriculum can be represented and enacted in these environments. It also provides a framework for inventing practices grounded in the realities of school settings. Doyle argues that classroom knowledge is the core foundation for teacher research and practice.
Lawrence A. Cremin: A Biographical Memoir
Authors: Lagemann Ellen Condliffe , Graham Patricia Albjerg
Published: February 2022

Lawrence A. Cremin was Frederick A. P. Barnard Professor of Education at Teachers College and president of the Spencer Foundation at the time of his untimely death, at the age of sixty-four, in September 1990. A former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, and a prolific author, Cremin played a leading role in many professional, governmental, and philanthropic organizations. This memoir, written by two of Cremin's former students and colleagues, details his life and career.
Understanding Family Literacy: Conceptual Issues Facing the Field
Authors: Gadsden Vivian L.
Published: February 2022

This article identifies issues in the development of family literacy as an area of research and practice. While the relative absence of theoretical frameworks in the field presents problems in developing long-term agendas, it creates opportunities for literacy specialists to examine conceptual issues for developing a field and determining its scope. The discussion here explores these issues within the context of recent child/adult literacy, family development, and family-support efforts, summarizing research and program factors that contribute to popular conceptions of family literacy. To examine the relationship between family development and literacy, five conceptual issues derived from the literature and from field observations are presented. In discussing these issues, the article suggests that two related questions be examined: (1) what constitutes literacy support to families with varied cultural, social, and political histories and (2) how the concept of family support is defined and interpreted by literacy specialists who have vastly different notions about the purposes of literacy within families and about who decides what the purposes should be. The article concludes by providing conceptual considerations for the development of a framework and suggesting an integrative, interdisciplinary approach, distinctive but based in the larger family-support movement. Such an approach brings together the common issues in K-12 and adult literacy and should provide for intensive instructional and human support to families. As this is done, literacy efforts at the level of research, practice, and policy focus on historical, social, and cultural issues facing families, including changing family forms, poverty, and reciprocal relationships in families as they occur in shared and nonshared home environments.
The Education We Receive: Lessons in Reception from Emerson and Cavell
Authors: Lynn Elizabeth M.
Published: February 2022

In the classroom as in other areas of public life, Americans confront a difficult question: How can we hope to understand or learn from one another if we do not share a common context of some sort? American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stanley Cavell can, I believe, help us develop new and significant answers to this question They ask us to reimagine what it is that relates us to one another, such that learning-can take place. And they invite us to discover those relations by practicing the art of reception. This practice of reception, I suggest, offers an important—even urgent alternative to contemporary modes of relating in the classroom.
The Ordeal of Change: A True Story of High School Reform
Authors: Cohen Rosetta Marantz
Published: February 2022

This study presents the story of a collaborative, interdisciplinary curriculum project, called the Quest Program, now being implemented at a suburban New England high school. The program, based loosely on the tenets of the Coalition of Essential Schools, resembles in many ways the growing number of grass-roots change efforts in schools around the country: It was a project embraced by teachers, supported by administrators, and collaboratively designed with 1 lege faculty. This study tells of the school's painful, ambiguous, and circuitous route toward partial and subjective success. In so doing, it contributes to the presently scant literature that candidly documents the practical reality of institutional change. The study concludes with a series of understandings that highlight the problematic nature of both instituting and researching such reform efforts.
Teaching for Understanding in the Disciplines—and Beyond
Authors: Gardner Howard , Boix-Mansilla Veronica
Published: February 2022

Current debates around the organization of precollegiate curriculum have directed considerable criticism at the dominant role assumed by subject matter or disciplines. Criticisms have ranged from a call for interdisciplinary or theme-based curricula to an emphasis on ”ways of knowing,” or “learning styles” as organizing units that replace disciplinary knowledge.

In this article, while acknowledging the merit of some of the critique, we propose a positive view of disciplinary knowledge. We claim that, over the years, knowledgeable human beings working in specific domains have developed concepts, methods, and perspectives as means of better understanding the physical, biological, and social worlds around us. We find students’ access to these disciplinary tools to be an indispensable ingredient of quality education. Shorn of disciplines we become intellectual barbarians.

Unfortunately, genuine understanding in the disciplines has proven hard to attain. After reviewing accumulated evidence of the enduring power of the “predisciplinary” mind, we sketch an educational approach designed to engender effective understanding within and across the disciplines. We illustrate this sketch with preliminary results from a study in which teachers attempt to enhance student understanding across the disciplines. In conclusion, we examine the practical difficulties that arise in attempting to educate for understanding and indicate how some of these obstacles might be dealt with.
The Political Economy of School Choice
Authors: Gintis Herbert
Published: February 2022

The analysis of the competitive delivery of educational services has often been coached in terms of an opposition between government regulation and the free market. This article suggests that regulation and markets may be complementary institutions that under appropriate conditions interact as a context for cost-effective equalitarian and socially accountable education.
Diversity and the New Immigrants
Authors: Miller Lamar P. , Tanners Lisa A.
Published: February 2022

New immigrants in the United States are enlivening the schools at the same time as they are overwhelming them. The waves of immigration have led to an increasingly diverse school population and have created a new set of problems. Today, with children from such diverse backgrounds, schools are inadequately prepared to serve the needs of the students who are arriving in increasing numbers. The challenges associated with the new immigrants are numerous. Problems now exist that are related to desegregation, multicultural education, higher-quality education, and bilingual education. As the population of our schools becomes more and more diverse, the most appropriate ways to educate this fascinating heterogeneous population must be sought.
Dream Deferred but Not Defeated
Authors: Wilkins Roger
Published: February 2022

The decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, may have been the seminal civil rights event of the twentieth century. It led to the dismantling of the systems of laws that kept blacks shackled as closely to slavery as possible. But the expectations of the lawyers and civil rights leaders that equality would follow such a decision were dashed because they had underestimated both the depth of American racism and the enormity of the remaining task of getting all of America's black agricultural workers into the mainstream economy. As the twentieth century ends, that task, left over from slavery, still faces the American people.
The Promise of Accountability and Standards in the Achievement of Equal Educational Opportunity
Authors: Gordon Edmund W.
Published: February 2022

The recent history of development in accountability in a variety of educational settings is discussed. Focus is on the national standards for educational achievement and the complexity of the problems in setting those standards. Among these complexities are issues that flow from the facts of diversity in the populations served by these institutions, and pluralism in the standards students must meet. In response to the considerable confusion around much of the policy planning as concerns these issues, emphasis is given to definitional clarity relative to constructs like diversity, pluralism, and equity. Attention is called to the ways in which chauvinism and communicentric bias may compromise the development and implementation of equitable systems of educational assessment that may also be universally applied.
Race and Choice in Montgomery County, Maryland, Magnet Schools
Authors: Henig Jeffrey R.
Published: February 2022

Analysis of the pattern of requests to transfer into elementary school magnet programs in Montgomery County, Maryland, suggests that the direction in which choice points may exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, racial segregation. White families were most likely to request transfer into schools with low proportions of minorities (which also were those located in higher-income neighborhoods), and minority families were more likely to opt for schools in low-income neighborhoods (which also tended to be schools with higher proportions of minority students). Significantly, this racial pattern held even when other characteristics of the schools were taken into account. Evidence from parental surveys suggests that, lacking other sharply defined clues about which schools are likely to benefit their children most, both minority and nonminority parents fall back on other criteria, including convenience, informal word-of-mouth, and concerns about their child's social integration. These criteria, while not racially determined, are racially influenced. The Montgomery County, Maryland, experience suggests that unfettered choice has the potential to exacerbate racial separation, even in a relatively liberal and prosperous setting. Choice can be structured so that it promotes racial integration and socioeconomic equality, but doing so requires that public officials take strong stands, and often politically unpopular ones.
Reexamining Social Science Research on School Desegregation: Long- versus Short-term Effects
Authors: Wells Amy Stuart
Published: February 2022

This article summarizes the role of social science research in examining the effects of school desegregation policies on African-American students. The author argues that much of the earliest research on the short-term effects of school desegregation on African-American students was not particularly helpful to policymakers because it tended to be simple input/output studies of standardized test scores after only one or two years of desegregation. Thus, this research tried to answer the question of whether school desegregation “works” to improve student achievement without con -textualizing the experiences of African-American students in desegregated schools or considering that “school desegregation” implementation may look radically different in different schools and districts. On the other hand, research on the short-term effects of desegregation on intergroup relations, which was more focused on what was taking place within the schools, and the long-term-effects research, which emphasized that integrated institutions provide access to social mobility and powerful social net -works, are more insightful and helpful to policymakers.
The Unending Struggle for Equal Educational Opportunity
Authors: Carter Robert L.
Published: February 2022

This article finds that Brown has not fulfilled its promise of securing equal educational opportunity for black children and that racial discrimination in the nation's public school systems is still the norm. In the great metropolitan areas of the country, demographic factors, segregated housing, neighborhood assignment policies, and school district configurations clustering poor and minority children in school districts separate from the largely white surrounding areas mean that a generation or more of blacks will be educated in racially isolated schools in many of the urban centers of the country. Thus our immediate concern must be to require those racially isolated schools to produce quality education for the black children who must attend them. Educators must take the lead in the fight to make Brown' s promise a reality, evaluating and monitoring the educational offerings provided for minority children to determine their quality and sufficiency. Educators should define and conceptualize equal educational opportunity in terms of its educational methodology, form, and content.
When Basic Skills and Information Processing Just Aren't Enough: Rethinking Reading in New Times
Authors: Luke Allan
Published: February 2022

Is reading simply a matter of neutral information processing or functional skills? This article draws on historical and contemporary perspectives to make the case that reading is a malleable social practice with identifiable moral and ideological consequences. It builds a four-tiered model that defines reading in contemporary social life in terms of four interconnected roles: coding, semantic, pragmatic, and critical. Critical reading—an awareness of and facility with the techniques by which texts and discourses construct and position human subjects and social reality—is an essential component of everyday life in social institutions. This is illustrated through text analyses of three “functional” texts: a textbook passage, a tenancy agreement, and a job application.
Serious Play
Authors: Mann Dale
Published: February 2022

Reformers are stuck on interventions centered on the schooling institution and the act of formal instruction. The meager results should prompt us to look elsewhere. Play is an active learning method far more powerful than its passive cousin. entertainment.

Children play for the experience of control, for curiosity, for (he intrinsic motivation of fun, and to learn. The types of play—sensory motor, dramatic symbolic, games with rules—are nicely intertwined with developmental stages. The activity grows the brain, lubricates action, and previews later life. Among the more important gams is a facilitation of symbolic manipulation.

Play is underutilized as a learning strategy and nearly completely ignored by reformers despite the hundreds of empirical citations documenting its power in cognitive development, language development, the growth of imagination and creativity, and the development of social competence. With the benefits of play so firmly established, we should find ways to overcome the economic and political obstacles to harnessing play to reform.
Community and Democracy in American Schools: Arthurdale and the Fate of Progressive Education
Authors: Perlstein Daniel
Published: February 2022

Arthurdale, West Virginia, was created by New Deal policymakers as a resettlement community for displaced coal miners. Its schools were a landmark in efforts to bring Deweyan ideals of progressive education to bear on community life. This article examines the pedagogy developed at Arthurdale and the history of the homestead in order to illuminate the ambiguities of educators’ efforts to promote community. The very features that endowed Arthurdale's community-centered schools with effectiveness and vitality obscured the social divisions that shaped the lives of Arthurdale's inhabitants. In particular, community-centered pedagogy ignored inequalities of race and class, which played a pivotal role at Arthurdale. This study suggests that such distortions cannot be easily excised from progressive pedagogy. Rather, they were central to progressive notions of child-centeredness, activity, and culture. Invocations of community fostered learning and citizen involvement, even as they camouflaged wider social inequalities. Arthurdale thus illustrates the difficulties facing those seeking to reconcile the sometimes complementary, sometimes competing demands of community and democracy as educational ideals.
Developing New Traditions in Secondary Schools: A Working Model for Organizational and Instructional Change
Authors: Shachar Hanna
Published: February 2022

This article describes a four-stage working model for implementing cooperative learning and changing patterns of teachers’ organizational behavior in secondary schools. The first stage is devoted to learning. The principal, the subject coordinators, and all the teachers participate in in-service training courses. In the second stage they practice what they have learned, with the assistance of school consultants. The third stage is devoted to the expansion of the change by the principal, and to the acquisition of expertise in the new teaching methods by the teachers. The fourth stage is institutionalizing the new traditions of organizational behavior and instruction by all school personnel. Special emphasis is put on the training of subject coordinators and department heads, who are perceived to comprise a natural group of leaders in the school. The practical steps to be taken, and the specific topics to be dealt with in each step, are presented in detail.
“Advanced” Ideas about Democracy: Toward a Pluralist Conception of Citizen Education
Authors: Parker Walter C.
Published: February 2022

Citizenship education is probably the most popular stated mission for public schooling in the United States, but it rests on a feeble conception of democratic citizenship that skirts social and cultural diversity. The effect, oddly enough, is a citizenship education that is unclear about its relationship with multicultural education, and sometimes positioned defensively toward it. Here I outline a conception of democratic citizenship that is appropriate to pluralist societies—a conception on which a renewed, deepened citizenship education might proceed.
From “Teacher as Decision Maker” to Teacher as Participant in “Shared Decision Making”: Reframing the Purpose of Social Foundations in Teacher Education
Authors: Beadie Nancy
Published: February 2022

This article explores how the idea of shared decision making can be used to reframe the purpose of social foundations in teacher education. Recent research shows that foundations educators need to find more effective ways of articulating the value of social foundations. The challenge is to make effective connections between the content of social foundations and the practical work of the individual “teacher as decision maker,” and yet to do so without losing attention to issues of social context and moral purpose that define the field of social foundations. The argument here is that the idea of shared decision making can help bridge this gap between the idea of teacher as decision maker and the content of foundational studies. The article takes an empirical approach to this argument, looking at what leading studies from the literature on educational decision making suggest about the value of social foundations for the work of teachers. Four studies in particular provide the core illustrations for this analysis, each representing a different level of educational decision making, and thus a different context for teacher involvement in education issues.
Unusual Allies: Elite and Grass-roots Origins of Parental Choice in Milwaukee
Authors: Carl Jim
Published: February 2022

This article outlines the development of the 1990 Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, for several years the only publicly funded K–12 voucher program in the United States. The program comprised an alliance of neoliberal reformers who sought to extend competitive markets to public education and Milwaukee-based supporters of a handful of inner-city “independent community schools” enrolling black and Latino students. Five factors generated this conditional alliance: dissatisfaction among many black Milwaukeeans with the Milwaukee Public Schools; the efforts of multicultural supporters of community schools who had sought public funding for two decades; the growth of black political power in Milwaukee during an era of rightward-tilting state policies, as personified by state representative Polly Williams; the actions of Governor Tommy Thompson to craft neoliberal and neoconservative social policy; and the rise of Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation as the nation's premier conservative grantmaker. This article suggests that, even given the serendipitous alignment of forces necessary for Milwaukee parental choice, the establishment of voucher programs in other large cities remains a distinct possibility.
Indigenous Invention: New Promise for School Reform
Authors: Heckman Paul E. , Peterman Francine
Published: February 2022

In recent years, there has been general recognition of the need for changes in the public school system, and various reform efforts have been—and are currently—under way throughout the country. We describe here two processes or strategies used in these change efforts. First is the historical and current use of the implementation-of-innovations process and its failure to promote sufficient school change for all children—especially those in low-income areas—to achieve and be successful. The second is “indigenous invention,” a strategy supported by evidence of changes in elementary schools participating in the foundation-funded school-change effort known as the Educational and Community Change (ECC) Project. The indigenous-invention process acknowledges that those indigenous to the school and neighborhood can bring about changes in schools that will engage the children and promote learning, and have the potential to decrease the school dropout rate.
Aligned Instructional Policy and Ambitious Pedagogy: Exploring Instructional Reform from the Classroom Perspective
Authors: Spillane James P. , Jennings Nancy E.
Published: February 2022

In recent years national, state, and local education reformers have paid increasing attention to two ideas about school reform. The first centers on ensuring more ambitious instruction for all students. The second has to do with crafting more coherent and closely aligned policies to support this ambitious instruction. This article explores these two popular reform ideas from the perspective of classroom teaching. We examine nine elementary school teachers’ responses to their local school district's efforts to press more ambitious ideas about literacy instruction. We argue that although the policy alignment strategy may be effective in changing surface-level aspects of teaching, it may be considerably less effective in reforming other difficult-to-reach dimensions of classroom practice (i.e., task and discourse). Further, we highlight the difficulties involved in figuring out the extent to which these recent reforms find their way into classroom practice.
Detracking: The Social Construction of Ability, Cultural Politics, and Resistance to Reform
Authors: Oakes Jeannie , Wells Amy Stuart , Jones Makeba , Datnow Amanda
Published: February 2022

Structural changes necessary in detracking efforts challenge not only the technical dimensions of schooling, but also the normative and political dimensions. We argue that detracking reform confronts fundamental issues of power, control, and legitimacy that are played out in ideological struggles over the meaning of knowledge, intelligence, ability, and merit. This article presents results from a three-year longitudinal case study of ten racially and socioeconomically mixed secondary schools participating in detracking reform. We connect prevailing norms about race and social class that inform educators’, parents’, and students’ conceptions of intelligence, ability, and giftedness with the local political context of detracking. By examining these ideological aspects of detracking we make a case for reexamining common presumptions that resistance to policies providing greater opportunities to low-income and minority children is driven by rational estimates of the learning costs and benefits associated with such reforms.
Teachers in Transition: The Impact of Antiracist Professional Development on Classroom Practice
Authors: Lawrence Sandra M. , Tatum Beverly Daniel
Published: February 2022

This article examines the impact of an antiracist professional development project on eighty-four suburban white teachers, all of whom are part of a voluntary desegregation program. Analysis of writing-sample data reveals that forty-eight of the eighty-four participants took antiracist actions as a result of their new learning about race and racism. In all, 142 specific actions were noted. The categories of action-taking related to three parameters of schooling: the quality of interpersonal interactions among school and community members, the curriculum, and the institution's policies regarding support services for students of color. The relationship between changes in the educators' racial-identity development and their behaviors is discussed as are the elements that contributed to the antiracist educational outcomes.
The Invisible Hand: Big Business and Chicago School Reform
Authors: Shipps Dorothy
Published: February 2022

Business influence in public school policymaking has been much noticed but little studied at the local level where policy is implemented. This article examines Chicago's governance reforms of the past decade as one case of corporate influence, clarifying how local political institutions and corporate organizational resources facilitated and shaped that involvement and the resulting school governance reforms. A wider variety of corporate influence patterns than is typically acknowledged is suggested by this case where corporate associations were involved in both policymaking and policy implementation. When corporate activism is accounted for, Chicago governance reform is seen primarily as replacing professional control with modern management techniques and structures, and only secondarily as the revitalization of democratic governance.
What Does it Mean When High School Teachers Participate in Collaborative Research with Students on Literacy Motivations?
Authors: Father Penny Old , Thomas Sally
Published: February 2022

This case study is an inquiry-within-an inquiry: As high-school students conducted a year-long participatory research project on motivation for literacy learning with their teachers, two university researchers studied the processes and outcomes of their project. The research was part of a six-year longitudinal study of student motivation in which students participated as coresearchers. The original study examined students' perceptions of their own reasons and purposes for literacy learning across elementary, middle level, and senior high school contexts in Southern California. As an outgrowth of that study, several of the students initiated collaborative research with teachers. Data were analyzed through constant comparison. Here, cases of six teacher participants are presented, with cross-case analyses that portray their views on the nature of knowledge, purposes of schooling, their approaches to teaching, their perspectives on the nature of motivation, and their roles and relationships within the culture of the school and with the research team. In collaborating with students in systematic ways about the purposes of literacy learning, the roots of their own intrinsic motivations, and the qualities of classrooms that support their learning, teachers were able to open up possibilities for personal growth and for small beginnings of transformation of school culture.
Chapter II: Writing for Readers: The Primacy of Audience in Composing
Authors: Rubin Donald L.
Published: February 2022

Welcome to our chapter.

I use “our” because in some very important ways you and I will be co-constructing this text. In fact, we're already underway. You have already started, no doubt, thinking about me, your author. And I have been thinking long and hard (too long, my editors would probably say) about you, my audience. As I compose, read, and recompose the words I have set out for you to read, I am ever trying to anticipate how you will react. I am trying to write and read through your eyes as well as through my own. I am trying to assay whether your responses will match my intentions.

If some of my assumptions miss the mark about you as a reader, I hope you will nonetheless find a way to temporarily inhabit the roles and attitudes I am inviting you to try on, and in that way become the audience for this chapter.
Standards, Accountability, and School Reform: Perils and Pitfalls
Authors: Sheldon Kennon M. , Biddle Bruce J.
Published: February 2022

This article examines current debates about educational standards, accountability systems, and school reform from the perspective of Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory. Evidence from this twenty-five-year tradition of research reveals various perils associated with rigid standards, narrow accountability, and tangible sanctions that can debase the motivations and performances of teachers and students. Teachers faced with reforms that stress such practices may become controlling, unresponsive to individual students, and alienated. Test- and sanction-focused students may lose intrinsic interest in subject matter, learn at only a superficial level, and fail to develop a desire for future learning. Thus, although reforms that stress standards, accountability, and sanctions may (or may not) succeed in raising test scores, they are also likely to sabotage a key goal of education—creating a flexible population of life-long learners who can adjust to the changing needs of society and the workplace. Alternative strategies for reform are suggested that place greater stress on trust, teacher professionalism, and responsive education for students.
Psychological Perspectives on the Early Reading Wars: The Case of Phonological Awareness
Authors: Calfee Robert C. , Norman Kimberly A.
Published: February 2022

The current mantra calls for resolving the early reading wars through a “balanced” approach. Defining balance will require careful theoretical and practical examination of specific elements in the acquisition of early reading skill. Phonemic awareness provides one opportunity for such an exercise. This article reviews origins of the construct from auditory perception through onset-rhyming patterns to the current emphasis on phoneme manipulation. Two points emerge from this review. First, both analysis of English orthography and survey of correlational data suggest that beginning readers are more likely to grasp the alphabetic principle when they can grasp the concept of the individual phoneme. Second, acquiring this competence is quite difficult for young pre-readers, but may be feasible if (1) students learn to use articulatory features as the basis for understanding phonemes, and (2) phoneme awareness and spelling-sound relations are taught synergistically. Remaining to be completed is the task of development and evaluatior of effective instructional programs to assess these hypotheses in large-scale naturalistic settings. The article describes a design-experiment strategy for approaching this task.
Gender and Antecedents of Performance in Mathematics Testing
Authors: Gallagher Ann
Published: February 2022

Gender differences in mathematics test performance have been documented extensively, providing a fairly clear picture of the circumstances under which differences are found. Notably fewer insights have been offered as to how these differences arise, why performance differences are found on tests but not in classroom grades, or what might be done to change current patterns. Using Halpern's (1997) psychobiosocial model of cognitive development as the point of departure, this article seeks to trace how differences in socialization patterns may contribute to cognitive processing differences, which, in turn, may lead to performance differences on tests.
The Uncertain Value of School Knowledge: Biology at Westridge High
Authors: Page Reba N.
Published: February 2022

This article describes and analyzes the surprisingly uncertain value of school science in an academically prestigious high school at a time when reform in science education is again a national priority. In a cultural analysis focused on school lessons, it traces how school participants produce a veritable absence of science in science classes and how the production is sensible, or understandable, given their particular institutional and social circumstances. What emerges, too, is the extraordinary reach, or complexity, of ordinary school lessons. However unevenly or intricately, lessons move from teacher plans to student responses, beyond events in classrooms to the culture of a school, across contemporary hybrids of divergent curricular rationales to long-past historical debates, while traveling between subject matter knowledge and status politics. Seeing their reach allows us to understand the long-standing muddlement of knowledge in U.S. schools, as well as what we can do about it.
A Movement against and beyond Boundaries:1 “Politically Relevant Teaching” among African American Teachers
Authors: Beauboeuf–Lafontant Tamara
Published: February 2022

The purpose of this article is to examine culturally relevant teaching as a political pedagogy and a contemporary manifestation of what was considered “good” teaching in many African American communities served by black segregated schools. Through examining several ethnographies and autobiographical accounts of segregated schools that were valued by black students and families, I assert that the “good” of these institutions hinged not simply on the cultural similarities between teachers and students, but more importantly on the “political clarity” of the teachers. That is, these educators recognized the existence of oppression in their students’ lives and sought to use their personal, professional, and social power to encourage children to understand and undermine their subordination. I also contend that because they use their knowledge of society's inequities and their influence to empower their marginalized students, the pedagogy of contemporary culturally relevant teachers might be more accurately called “politically relevant teaching.” I conclude the article by discussing how recognizing the political and historical dimensions of culturally relevant teaching may broaden its application, as issues of racism and social injustice are relevant to all Americans and not only to people of color.
Access to Constructivist and Didactic Teaching: Who Gets It? Where is it Practiced?
Authors: Smerdon Becky A. , Burkam David T. , Lee Valerie E.
Published: February 2022

Calls for the reform of instruction in U.S. classrooms, particularly in secondary schools, are growing and often strident. Many reformers advocate a move away from traditional, teacher-centered, (didactic) direct instruction, where students are passive receptors of knowledge, toward more student-centered understanding-based (constructivist) teaching that focuses on exploration and experimentation. In this study we investigate the issue of access to these two types of instruction in U.S. high school science classrooms. We use a nationally representative sample of 3,660 students and their science teachers drawn from the first two waves of the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS:88). Although didactic instruction is more common among higher–socioeconomic status and female students, constructivist instruction is practiced more often among students of lower ability. Constructivist teaching is also more common in both higher-level science courses (i.e., chemistry) and lower-level courses (i.e., basic biology and physical science). The students of average social and academic status appear to be the forgotten majority with respect to constructivist instruction. We offer explanations for the findings and discuss implications for educational policy and social equity in high school science.
Becoming a Special Educator: Specialized Professional Training for Teachers of Children with Disabilities in Boston, 1870–1930
Authors: Osgood Robert L.
Published: February 2022

This article examines the origins of the development of a separate professional identity as special educators for teachers of children with disabilities in the United States, focusing particularly on the Boston, Massachusetts, public schools from 1870 to 1930. The article first traces emergent professionalization among teachers in institutions for individuals with disabilities, identifying specific training programs as well as the growth of professional knowledge and professional associations. It then discusses efforts by the Boston public schools to provide specialized training for teachers recruited to work in four special education programs: the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, conservation of eyesight classes for children with vision impairments, speech improvement classes for students with identified speech disorders, and special classes for children considered mentally retarded. Each program is examined in terms of desired teacher characteristics, requirements for hiring or certification, in-service programs to enhance professional knowledge, and other professional opportunities such as associations, publications, and mentoring. The article concludes with a brief discussion of how teacher training has contributed to the separation between general and special educators and how it might be redesigned to facilitate a reintegration of these separate professional worlds.