A descriptive case study approach is employed using a content analysis of the blogs of 36 school leaders who took part in the 2016-2017 Shadow a Student Challenge project and follow up interviews of five of the school leaders. This research was used to explore and describe how an empathetic design approach provided a greater vantage point for…

This article presents research relating to the experiences of union and community-based campaigns that have sought to challenge the establishment of academy and free schools in England. Such schools are removed from local government control and are seen as a defining element of the neoliberal restructuring of public education. The research draws…

The modern-day community schools movement reached a new plateau in 2008 when Randi Weingarten made community schools a central element of her platform as the new president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT's action was a milestone on a journey that began a decade earlier, when advocates for community schools determined that it…

During the period of 1981 to 2015, the total population of Black students in CPS plummeted from close to 240,000, 60% of all CPS students, to 156,000 or 39% of CPS. This paper documents how despite their decreasing numbers and percentage in the system, the vast majority of Black students remained isolated in predominantly low-income Black schools…

"Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Education" provides a much-needed blueprint for how school leaders can leverage the power of collaborative learning to create more culturally and linguistically responsive schools. The book describes an innovative network of twenty preK-8 schools located across the United States striving to…

We read and analyzed 165,000 words and uncover a series of counter-stories buried within a textual corpus, authored by Teach For America (TFA) founder Wendy Kopp (Kopp, 1989, 2001; Kopp & Farr, 2011), that offers insight into the forms of racism endemic to Teach For America. All three counter-stories align with a critical race theory (CRT)…

The authors situate the emergence and effects of contemporary market-based reforms within a framework of urban political economy that centers on racial inequality. They discuss how and why market-based reforms have evolved alongside racialized political and economic trends that have transformed cities over the past century, and they critically…

School administrators have the second greatest effect on student learning, after classroom instruction. The author's literature review shows Leithwood et al.'s (2008) framework of leadership actions to be influential in instructional leadership and student success. School leaders are advised to (1) build vision and set direction, (2) develop staff…

This article describes how community colleges take on major changes as they undergo complete organizational redesign and streamlining of programming and services in the face of multiple challenges.

This study explored complicated personal narratives of school reform generated by participants in response to a particular small schools reform initiative. Narrative data was dialogically generated in interviews with nine past participants of an urban high school conversion project planned and implemented over a span of five years toward the goal…

This article examines the vision of the Swedish comprehensive school reform between 1946-1962 as it pertains to the ever-troubling questions of discipline and order in school. Inspired primarily by the work of Michel Foucault and his genealogical perspective, the article problematises the notion that character formation and school discipline…

This article provides a case study of union change in an environment in which radical school restructuring is taking place, and active strategies to weaken and marginalize organized teachers are being pursued by the state. The case study union is the National Union of Teachers in England. The article explores a number of different strategies open…

If you can believe the daily flood of mass media stories, journal articles, and white papers, the United States is facing a STEM worker crisis. Business leaders and politicians warn that the nation is falling hopelessly behind in the global economic race because our students are unprepared for and uninterested in science, technology, engineering,…

This article features an interview with Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings. In this interview, Hastings relates that he told the "Wall Street Journal" in 2008 that he started looking at education--trying to figure out why our education is lagging when our technology is increasing at great rates and there's great innovation in so many other areas…

In 2008 Ireland found itself in the forefront of the Eurozone crisis. The impact on education has been profound. In this article it is suggested that Ireland's education problems long pre-date the economic crisis and current "reforms" are about long-term neoliberal restructuring, not short-term solutions to immediate economic problems.…