Background: One of the most influential factors shaping college students' prosocial development--the development of attitudes and behaviors that involve positive engagement within one's community and larger society--is the peer group. Friends have an especially important influence on students' learning and development because of the time and…

Background: Choice is a key part of the culture of the United States. Americans believe deeply in the personal and social usefulness of being able to make many choices. Hence, all sorts of efforts have been made to increase students' options, whether by creating many different kinds of schools and colleges, offering a great array of majors and…

Background: Scholars have increasingly expressed concern about a new secessionist movement, grounded in a doctrine of localism and facilitated by permissive state policies regarding the formation of new school districts. Critics contend that school district secessions threaten to exacerbate patterns of segregation and inequality in schools.…

Background: Promise programs have grown exponentially. Yet, we are still learning how systemic barriers affect promise program students' abilities to meet promise program requirements and their postsecondary goals. Objective: The Degree Project (TDP) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was the nation's first randomized control trial of a promise scholarship.…

Background: American students represent diverse life experiences, languages, cultures, and community memberships. Given the relatively unchanged demographics of U.S. teachers (primarily middle-class, white females), it is important that teachers engage in culturally proactive pedagogy and design curriculum that both reflects their students'…

Background and Context: Racialized disparities in curricular tracking have long been ascribed to narrow tests that create a hierarchy of perceived ability. Consequently, teachers are urged to reject deficit views of ability and embrace more expansive techniques to reveal and respond to the real-life needs of students, especially those from…

Background/Context: While K-12 research places parents at the center of understanding students' educational outcomes, empirical analyses of academic undermatch, and transition into higher education more broadly, have focused primarily on students' attitudes and behaviors. Family is implicitly present in the background but rarely brought to the…

Background/Context: Students, classrooms, teachers, and schools form hierarchical units of any schooling system that compete for, say, educational resources and sometimes blame one another for the failure to meet a certain societal goal. Little educational research exists that separates competing effects on schooling outcomes across these…

Background/Context: Human rights education has proliferated in the past four decades and can be found in policy discussions, textbook reforms, and grassroots initiatives across the globe. This article specifically explores the role of creativity and imagination in human rights education (HRE) by focusing on a case study of one non-governmental…

Background/Context: There is much literature that examines how the desegregation literature had implications for majority teachers and its impact on students of color. However, little has been written about the experiences of teachers of color working in suburban desegregated majority schools. Focus of Study: This article examines how intergroup…

An examination is made of dependency in the area of educational analysis and policy formation on the use of metaphorical thinking. A clarification is made of the conceptual difficulties that arise from the inability to understand the difference between the phenomenological world and the symbolic world. (JN)

Throughout the educational history of American society, the entrance of a new group was extremely threatening to the established traditionalists already in power at educational institutions. An analysis is done of the advent of various groups onto the American educational scene. Implications are made for modern comparisons. (JN)

Consistent with the Williams v. California suit, our focus in this article is on educational equity, particularly the interface between equity and school organization. We concentrate on two structural issues, school size and school overcrowding, and one specific school structure, schools-within-schools. We organize the article as an interpretive…

The problem of youth unemployment in the state of New York is explored in a study which begins with a general review of the sociodemographic features of the target population. Other topics include: work experience and education, attitudes toward work, job entry and career ladder jobs, and unemployment among minority youth. (JN)

Discusses the long history of social and political constructions of differences in United States society and public schools, including the social constructions of diversity, educators' policies for handling diversity, the influence of white ethnic groups, and racial and sex discrimination. (SM)