Teacher educators, literacy scholars, and classroom teachers are beginning to develop curricula that leverage digital literacy practices and make visible what elementary students are learning across modalities. Although this body of work provides valuable examples (e.g., digital storytelling, innovative uses of digital apps and platforms, creating…

Recent research and theoretical work on whiteness in teaching highlights reific, monolithic discourses that position white teachers as deficient, resistant, naive, and ignorant. I seek to complicate similar reductive portrayals through a two-year case of one high school teacher's racial identities and subjectivities in and beyond the English…

"Being Bad" will change the way you think about the social and academic worlds of Black boys. In a poignant and harrowing journey from systems of education to systems of criminal justice, the author follows her brother, Chris, who has been designated a "bad kid" by his school, a "person of interest" by the police, and…

In this article, a veteran teacher expresses the importance of drawing on the life-texts of students and recognizing the ways that personal experience influences a student's perception of the world.

The growing opportunity and achievement gaps between and within school divisions in the Richmond, Virginia area are a concern of late. Educational experts and researchers attribute these disparities in part to factors such as less-qualified teachers, poor curricula, and inferior school facilities that are linked to racially and socioeconomically…

In his new book, Michael Vavrus helps readers better understand why issues of diversity and difference are so highly contested in the United States and across the globe. Vavrus incorporates specific education examples throughout the text to examine six contested areas: race and ethnicity; socioeconomic class and culture; multicultural and ethnic…

Every year, the Austin Independent School District (AISD) administers the Student Substance Use and Safety Survey to a random, representative sample of middle and high school students. The survey tracks student knowledge, attitudes, and behavior over time. These results are from the 2014-2015 school year.

Almost two-thirds of students who enter community colleges every year are judged to be academically not ready to engage in college-level coursework. In order to enroll, these students typically must take one or more "remedial" or "developmental" math or English courses that will not count toward their college degree. The…

Dual language (DL) is an increasingly popular bilingual education model, touted for its promise to mitigate the historical achievement gap of the growing Latinx population while also teaching Spanish to English speakers. While DL programs may alleviate Latinxs' educational disparities in some cases, recent scholarship has noted a paradox: in other…

In spite of the relative success of the Widening Participation policy and strategies to increase the numbers of students from Black and Minority and White working-class backgrounds going to university, universities in Britain continue to be White and middle-class-dominated institutions. We found, in our two-year qualitative Higher Education…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 failed to adequately account for African American student K-12 academic performance. In fact, the NCLB policy has harmed the minority students it was designed to help. When compared to White K-12 students, African American students are more likely to drop out of high school. Of those that do graduate, a…

African American college students have historically faced many forms of rejection and isolation at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), particularly during the early years of academic integration (Allen, 1992; Mendoza-Denton, Downey, Purdie, Davis & Pietrzak, 2002). This study was conducted to determine if African American students who…

The Student Substance Use and Safety Survey, administered annually to a random, representative sample of AISD middle and high school students, provides self-report data on student knowledge, attitudes, and behavior related to substance use and school safety issues. These are the results from the spring 2014 survey.

I use Marimba Ani's Asili concept as defined in "Yurugu" to examine the school accountability model. By school accountability model, I mean the school model that consists of privately managed "public schools" regulated by state testing programs. I argue that school accountability is essentially oppressive and its success…

In his new book, the author of the bestseller "Why Race and Culture Matter in Schools" examines the chronic underperformance of African American males in U.S. schools. Citing a plethora of disturbing academic outcomes for Black males, this book focuses on the historical, structural, educational, psychological, emotional, and cultural…