California is expanding transitional kindergarten (TK) to become a universal preschool program for all four-year-old children. Upwards of 300,000 children are expected to enroll in universal transitional kindergarten (UTK) by 2025, requiring thousands of additional lead teachers and classroom aides to meet lower student-to-teacher ratio…

This paper reports an intervention study in the teaching of fraction concepts at a village school in Hong Kong. The classes consisted of 60 Grade three students with different cultural backgrounds, including African, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Nepalese, and Pakistani. The study represents one of the relatively few studies that investigate the…

When language is defined narrowly in mathematics classrooms, racially and linguistically minoritized students in classrooms could be systematically positioned as "learners of deficiency." Recent scholarship calls for expanding the notion of language to emphasize embodied expression of mathematical ideas. Taking a critical perspective to…

Background: Socioeconomic gaps in children's academic and social skills are large upon Kindergarten entry (von Hippel, Workman, and Downey 2018; Reardon 2011; Reardon and Portilla 2016). Preschool programs may yield particularly large benefits to low-income students and racially minoritized groups and may be promising for reducing inequalities…

Chinese as the medium of instruction (MOI) is used across the curriculum for early childhood education in Hong Kong; however, kindergartens with non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students adopt different MOI, in which English remains an integral part of learning and teaching, to cater to the needs of NCS students and their families. The present study…

The use of linguistic landscapes (LLs) to expand the respect for and knowledge of minoritized language use has extended into classroom practice and teacher preparation. Nuanced racialized understandings of language that include multimodal and multilingual realities, however, complicate the potential for educators to make sense of the language they…

Most U.S. educational reforms have narrowly focused on how to improve the ways in which students use language, and most specifically English. But in the last two decades, it is something called "academic language" that has permeated all education discourse. Here we discuss the development of the construct of academic language and the…

Variationist researchers are increasingly adopting intersectionality approaches to analyse identity-linked practice. However, the field of sociolinguistic variation is yet to embrace the full ramifications of intersectionality as an analytical framework. The current paper offers a new method for integrating intersectional approaches into…

Vojvodina is one of the most ethnically diverse regions in Europe where, according to the latest census in 2011, Hungarians are the largest non-Serb national minority group. In recent decades, this northern province of Serbia has faced continuous depopulation, forcing schools and nurseries to face an uncertain future. We argue that despite the…

This article uses a translanguaging framework, together with critical case sampling and qualitative analysis, to explore how six students approached literacy in an integrated dual-language (DL) program in a low-income, working-class, predominantly African American school. Students' translanguaging practices encompassed a broad repertoire of…

This ethnographic study utilized border theory to examine how a bilingual Latinx teacher created equitable instruction for Mexican immigrant second-graders in a 50-50 dual-language (DL) classroom in the U.S. Midwest. Approximately half the students in the DL classroom came from Spanish-speaking, working-class homes, and half from English-speaking,…

We identify contributions in this special issue in terms of two essential ways of threading systemic change for language equity in schools: theories/concepts from school governance down to classroom practice, and values/morals from practical realities in classrooms up. We characterize 'language equity' as a sense of belonging and meaningful…

This study reports on an investigation into the perspectives of different stakeholders (e.g. administrators, teachers, students, and parents) towards motivations for introducing English as a medium of instruction (EMI) policy in low-resourced public schools, serving minoritized students, and language ideologies that form its practices. Framed…

Are parental inputs complements or substitutes to education quality? Using variation induced by identification into a gifted and talented (GT) program, I find no aggregate effects on parental behavior as a result of their child's access to a higher quality education. However, there are heterogeneous effects. Non-minority parents decrease…

The purpose of this report is to describe basic descriptive statistics on barriers to parent-school involvement data that are available using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011). The brief begins by examining the level of parents' involvement in activities in their children's schools and the specific…