In scholarly research, racial categories are typically taken for granted. However, race categories vary over time and geography and reflect the social beliefs of the people who use them. Informed by quantitative critical race theory analysis, we interrogate how race categories align (or not) with 24,000 U.S. higher education students' responses to…

Building on W. E. B. Du Bois's color line concept, I argue that white supremacy is deeply embedded in U.S. educational organizations and that White racial actors, opportunity hoarding, and the cultivation of racial ideology and racial ignorance help sustain it. In doing this, I seek to move away from the aspirational progress narratives often…

Education policy research on White parent opportunity hoarding overlooks whiteness studies and focuses on individual-level behaviors. In this article, we advance a racial network analysis of White parent collectives to better understand how White parents reinforce racial hierarchies in schools.

In the wake of racial justice protests in the United States, many states adopted policies to constrain the discussion of racism, particularly contemporary and systemic racism, in K-12 classrooms. Discursively framed as "critical race theory bans," these policies enumerate lists of "prohibited concepts" to be eliminated from…

In this essay, two women of Color researchers examine the intersections of race and disability and ask, "What is the power and purpose of positioning and positionality statements?" Informed by Black feminist theory, and drawing from the DisCrit tenets of intersectional oppressions, historicity, and whiteness and ability as property, the…

The last several decades have seen a growth in scholarship and application of culturally responsive and sustaining educational (CRSE) approaches in schools serving youth of color. A growing body of research has shown how CRSE serves as an effective strategy to engage students of color, combat pernicious stereotypes, and improve academic outcomes.…

A controversial, equity-focused mathematics reform in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) featured delaying Algebra I until ninth grade for all students. This study examines student-level longitudinal data on mathematics course-taking across successive cohorts of SFUSD students who spanned the reform's implementation. We observe…

National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb"--among the most powerful moments of the 2021 presidential inauguration--inspired the central inquiry of the 18th Annual "Brown" Lecture in Education Research: Why are we still climbing the hill of educational equity 67 years after the U.S. Supreme Court's…

Education research commonly uses racial terminology but with little understanding of racial classification patterns across the field. In this study, we surface the use of racial terminology using a census of original research published in American Educational Research Association journals between 2009 and 2019. We do so as an ethical…

"Racial literacy" has contributed powerful advances in multiple disciplines about how race and racism are understood. Many education scholars use the concept to refer to antiracist practices and ideologies, a definition that casts some people as either racially literate or illiterate. In this essay the author draws on examples from…

School-based actors can uphold racialized systems and White supremacy through the racialized youth trauma narratives they reproduce. With respect to the growing movement to better support trauma-exposed youth inside school contexts, it is imperative that school-based actors avoid perpetuating deficit views of youth of color, who are…

We compiled the first longitudinal data set with detailed state funding information to examine whether different funding strategies for public higher education correlate with college access and completion, with a focus on outcomes among racially minoritized students. We found no relationships between funding mechanisms and student outcomes at…

This brief analyzes 4-year graduation rates among students ever classified as English learners (ever-ELs) and those never classified as English learners (never-ELs) at the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, and neighborhood income. We follow two cohorts of New York City students who entered ninth grade in 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 (N =…

The realities of a global pandemic coupled with economic, climate, and racial crises have exacerbated existing racial injustices in schools and society. Although many have argued for a principled refusal to return to an inequitable "normal" (Roy, 2020), dominant models of educational improvement prioritize technical-rational approaches…

Most students in the United States attend suburban schools. However, most education research focuses on urban school districts. This may be in part because many of the core issues that currently drive education research--issues of race and class inequities, social mobility, immigration, English learning--are believed to be "urban"…