Since 1980, Chicago's United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) has been a major player in school reform, organising Mexican-American communities to build a neighbourhood high school, founding a local technical institute, passing radical school governance reform, and launching a major charter network. At UNO's apex in 2013, a corruption scandal…

This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study the impacts of ZOC on student achievement and college enrollment using a matched…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to determine the degree to which school choice was related to the academic achievement of Texas high school students. Schools of choice were compared to neighborhood high schools in terms of their students' passing rates in the standardized End-of-Course (EOC) exams in English I and…

The aim of this study was to examine the opinions of secondary school math teachers regarding the examination system for the transition to high school which was implemented for the first time in 2017-2018 academic year in Turkey. The research was conducted in the second semester of 2018-2019 academic year, a semi-structured interview form was used…

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have shown considerable improvements in student achievement over the last 20 years, but concerns about unequal educational opportunities across different communities in the city continues to be a pressing issue. The North Lawndale Cluster Initiative (NLCI) sought to improve academic achievement and educational…

This article tells the story of two exploratory youth-centered participatory action research (PAR) projects to consider how youth-centered research can resist inequality. In this paper, I focus on the findings and process of two PAR projects that took place within one geographically isolated neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The studies focused…

Sewall County, located in metropolitan Atlanta, and its public school system experienced significant demographic change between 2000 and 2010. The population doubled, reaching more than 200,000 residents, and its percentage of White residents fell by 25% to just more than 55%. Its public school system is now considered majority-minority. Using the…

In Turkey, the social and economic changes of the past couple of decades have facilitated a neoliberal reconstruction of the city and a concomitant reorganisation of its educational spaces. The interaction between the urban space economy and school spaces has been documented by various studies, most of which point to the interplay between…

Social scientists have begun to document the stratifying effects of over a decade of unprecedented charter growth in urban districts. An exodus of students from traditional neighborhood schools to charter schools has attended this growth, creating troubling numbers of vacant seats in neighborhood schools as well as concentrating larger percentages…

Massive school closures are occurring in urban school districts across the United States. Research suggests that school closures are the outcome of racialized neoliberal policies and decades of disinvestment that have left many urban districts with fiscal deficits and declining student enrollments. However, some urban communities have successfully…

This article provides an example of, and lessons from, teaching and learning critical mathematics in a Chicago public neighborhood high school with a social justice focus. It is based on a qualitative study of my untracked, 12th-grade mathematics class, a full-year enactment of mathematics for social and racial justice. Students were Black and…

This study of 952 fifth and sixth graders in Washington, DC, and Alexandria, Virginia, found that students who were offered the "Higher Achievement" program had higher test scores in mathematical problem solving and were more likely to be admitted to and attend private competitive high schools. "Higher Achievement" is a…

For a period of 85 years, the M Street/Dunbar High School was an academically elite, all-black public high school in Washington, D.C. As far back as 1899, its students came in first in citywide tests given in both black and white schools. Over this 85-year span, approximately 80 percent of M Street/Dunbar's graduates went on to college, even…

The shift in education reform to a goal of college and career readiness for all students is a change that has been embraced widely across the country. The challenge of designing new policies and programs that could accomplish the goal that all students should graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college…

Exploratory research investigates how students in a neighborhood high school navigate the complex school choice admissions process in New York City. Four years of in-depth, longitudinal interviews with thirty minority youth explores how their status as "non-admits" (students rejected from all schools) shapes their perceptions of peers…