Background or Context: Teachers are often positioned as the main providers of educational equity and access for culturally and linguistically diverse learners (CLDLs). Teachers' beliefs regarding this population can play a major role in their instructional and curricular decisions. Purpose, Objective, Research Question, or Focus of Study: In this…

Background and Context: Continuous improvement and networked improvement science have emerged as prominent approaches to improving schools. Although continuous improvement approaches have generated promising results in education, how these efforts come to be enacted remains a crucial question that can generate insight into how these approaches can…

Background or Context: There is increasing research focusing on dual language (DL) education program policies and practices regarding who has access to bilingualism and whose bilingualism is valued and represented. However, limited research is situated in the context of Chinese-English DL education and its service of emergent bilingual learners…

Background: Scholars widely acknowledge that politics help explain why policies are adopted and how they play out in states, districts, and schools. To date, political analyses of education reform tend to isolate a particular policy and examine the politics of its adoption or implementation, but pay less attention to the effects of the politics of…

Background/Context: Performance funding finances public higher education institutions based on outcomes such as retention, course and degree completion, and job placement rather than inputs such as enrollments. One of the mysteries of state performance funding for higher education is that despite great interest in it for over 30 years, only half…

Background/Context: While much has been written about the history of immigration and naturalization in the United States, few scholars have looked at the history of citizenship education and testing. The small body of literature on the subject has primarily focused on World War I-era Americanization efforts and, as such, has excluded later…

Background/Context: Although progress has been made since members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication passed the Students' Right to Their Own Language resolution (1974), there still remains a demand to examine youth perceptions of language. Such examinations can help teachers and researchers improve curricular choices, honor…

Background/Context: Prior research on the challenges of college going and retention among adolescents today, particularly low-income, minority, and first-generation college-going youth, provide the context for this article. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article sets the stage for the special issue articles by framing the…

Background/Context: In the last several decades, a college education, in particular the bachelor's degree, has become the key to higher earnings, and overall, to a middle-class lifestyle in the United States. In an increasingly globalized economy, privileging information and communication technologies, it is more than likely that this emphasis on…

Discusses (1) school drug testing and reasons why schools should have embraced it; (2) educational systems' responses to student drug testing and reasons schools have not adopted it; and (3) school social organization and politics accounting for schools' deploring drug use yet ignoring potentially useful technology. Four responses are appended.…