Family and community engagement are proven strategies for strengthening schools. Across the United States, parents and community members have pressed school boards and district leadership for more transparency and broader participation in decisions about school turnaround. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to understand the…

Today's modern landscape of leaders fails to accurately represent societal diversity. This inequity, as in all inequities, is not accidental, but instead the results of socially constructed norms that begin in childhood. In this dissertation, I question how internalized norms of white supremacy and patriarchy perpetuate racial and gender aligned…

Restorative justice (RJ) practices have expanded significantly with the aim of improving school safety. Despite RJ's potential for transformative change, the factors driving these changes have rarely been the focus of rigorous scientific investigation. This qualitative study applies a system change framework to examine how organizational system…

When a struggling high school may be placed on turnaround status during a bid for a school bond, the district considers replacing a beloved principal with a record of low test scores with an unpopular principal whose record shows increased student achievement. The school board must decide whether to prioritize finances, community support, student…

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is a form of critical participatory action research that provides young people with opportunities to identify injustices in their current social realities, to gather and analyze data about these phenomena, and to determine actions that will begin to rectify their negative outcomes. A growing body of…

When Ana, a student in Miss Jerome's American Literature course, watched a makeup tutorial instead of completing her assigned work, it became a critical incident highlighting how one educator used student counterscripts to critically center students' ways of knowing and ways of being in the English curriculum. Using culturally sustaining…

This article discusses how the key players' multilayered collaboration may be enacted by the Change Laboratory methodology in the footsteps of Virkkunen and Newnham (2013) to address a complex issue for the benefit of adolescents. It can be defined as a group processing approach used by a group to solve a problem of its own defining. Over six…

This article focuses on how Year 11 secondary students view themselves as political beings, voice political ideas, and think critically about political participation. The research was motivated by the public representation of young citizens disengaged from political processes such as voting, and the authors' perception of a gap in students'…

This paper considers some of the ways that schools play a role in shaping higher education (HE) decision-making. Through their everyday practices and processes, schools can carry hidden messages about progression to HE, including choice of university. The sorts of routine aspects of school life dealt with here include events and activities,…

Progressive policies protecting women's rights to make reproductive decisions and the recent increase in literature exploring female sexual agency do not appear to have impacted on more equitable sexual relations in all contexts. In South Africa, gender power inequalities, intersecting with other forms of inequality in society, pose a challenge…

This paper reports on the qualitative study that used in-depth interviews and document reviews on financial management practices in their schools. The participants were school principals of the case study schools. The findings of the study highlighted problems regarding the implementation of the policy--despite the Manual for Principals of…

This article highlights a research project that involved formerly incarcerated adults who were school noncompleters. The project engaged the participants in a series of activities to explore their experiences and gain insights into approaches to dropout prevention they believed would help students at risk to complete high school. This article…

Background: Limited research has been conducted on student voice with students in physical education. Accessing and responding to student voice are relevant for researchers and physical education teachers to develop physical education programs that are meaningful and have a sense of purpose to the students themselves. It is through listening to…

In this case study, you are the associate superintendent and chief academic officer (CAO) of a large school district in the southwest. The case involves the complex issue of how to serve the burgeoning adolescent immigrant population in your school district. The study considers how a school that is situated in the heart of a Hispanic/Latino…

Assistant high school principal Elise Abbott is disturbed by the autocratic decision-making of the interim principal Marla Richardson. She meets with Marla to discuss Marla's approval of the English department chair's removal of master teacher Alice Tremont from gifted/talented courses. The chair reassigned the courses to herself. Although the…