Race, Geography, and School Choice Policy: A Critical Analysis of Detroit Students’ Suburban School Choices

The purpose of this study is to advance our thinking about race and racism in geospatial analyses of school choice policy. To do so, we present a critical race spatial analysis of Detroit students’ suburban school choices. To frame our study, we describe the racial and spatial dynamics of school choice, drawing in particular on the concepts of opportunity hoarding and predatory landscapes. We find that Detroit students’ suburban school choices were circumscribed by racial geography and concentrated in just a handful of schools and districts. We also find notable differences between students in different racial groups. For all Detroit exiters, their schools were significantly more segregated and lower quality than those of their suburban peers. We propose future directions for research on families’ school choices as well as school and district behavior at the intersection of race, geography, and school choice policy.

Immigrant Children in a Pol(ICE) State

Guided by the following questions: (1) What are the experiences of immigrant children attending schools in communities experiencing police brutality and anti-immigrant sentiments? (2) How do middle school children of immigrants visually represent their experiences with legal violence? and (3) What are children’s visions of freedom and community safety in this context?, this article highlights the understudied preadolescent children of immigrants through a 2-year study of a multidisciplinary theater class at a local elementary school in South Central Los Angeles. Data includes child interviews, class observations, artwork, and performance videos, from recently arrived Mexican and Central American children aged 10 to 13 years. Findings reveal how children come to understand policing, reinforcing concepts like “good cop/bad cop,” conflating local police and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, but also imagining alternatives for community safety outside of police systems. This work contributes to the fields of immigration, abolitionist education, and ethnic studies, among others, offering new ways of supporting immigrant children through the use of arts-based tools.

When Learning Is Life Giving: Redesigning Schools With Indigenous Systems of Relationality

This article illustrates how designing schools with Indigenous systems of relationality can be life giving for a healthier post-COVID world. Indigenous systems of relationality—the worldviews, beliefs and practices, and moral precepts of being in relation with the rest of the living world—are the cornerstone of Indigenous knowledges, and the cornerstone of Indigenous families and communities. We consider the ways in which Indigenous systems of relationality can offer strategies for educators, families, and communities to redesign approaches to learning in schools in ways that sustain and promote life. Drawing on three case studies of schools in Thailand, México, and Colombia, we show how educators might respond to the specific needs within their communities, repair the fracturing of humans from nature, and orient us to life-giving forms of activity that are beneficial beyond our current crises and into the future.

Teachers’ Time Use and Affect Before and After COVID-19 School Closures

Several large-scale survey efforts have attempted to understand teachers’ experiences in the early months of the pandemic. Our study complements this literature by providing direct evidence of teachers’ work prior to and after the onset of COVID-19. We leverage unique longitudinal time use and affect data on 131 teachers from one district across the 2019–2020 school year. Specifically, we provide a full accounting of teachers’ instructional activities, their reports of their positive affect and negative affect while engaged in these activities, and the extent to which teachers’ work experiences changed post-COVID. Our results suggest a large reduction in teachers’ daily instructional minutes, which were replaced with increased planning, paperwork, and interactions with colleagues and parents. Teachers’ overall positive and negative affect did not change post-COVID. But teachers’ affective responses to specific work activities did. Post-COVID, we saw increases in teachers’ positive affect when with students.

Higher Education in India in the Time of Pandemic, Sans a Learning Management System

Higher education in India was caught completely unawares by the COVID-19 pandemic and the necessitated closure of educational institutions. Despite almost a decade of experience with online and distance learning at some top-tier and private institutions, the vast majority were unprepared and looked for quick solutions for different components of teaching–learning depending on the need of the hour. The immediate tool sought was a videoconferencing platform to substitute in-class lectures. With no access to a learning management system, faculty chose one platform for videoconferencing, one for interaction with students, and another for uploading class notes. Disparity in students’ access to devices and the internet presented challenges. Assessment of learning, which hitherto was largely pen and paper based, was delayed for lack of a viable solution. Experiences documented in this study demonstrate faculty resilience, but lack of institutional leadership and preparedness is starkly evident.

Egypt’s ICT Reform: Adoption Decisions and Perspectives of Secondary School Teachers During COVID-19

This descriptive quantitative survey study explored the perspectives of 221 secondary school teachers from 19 Egyptian governorates on the ICT (information and communications technology) component of the 2017 education reform. Data were collected during the novel context and mandates dictated by the widespread COVID-19. The main indicators of teachers’ perspectives were adopted from Rogers’s diffusion of innovation theory, while their digital competencies were aligned with the levels of the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework. The study found that the majority of participants hold positive perspectives on the relative advantage of ICT integration, average perspectives on its complexity, and negative perspectives on its compatibility with Egypt’s education needs and main priorities. Findings further highlight the presence of multiple challenges that may affect teachers’ decision to adopt/reject the ICT reform, including the human and technological infrastructures as well as communication. The insights gained from this study may assist in understanding teachers’ level of persuasion, possible sources of social resistance, and need for effective capacity building.

“If We Don’t Do It, Nobody Is Going to Talk About It”: Indigenous Students Disrupting Latinidad at Hispanic-Serving Institutions

Hispanic and Latinx are terms that conflate ethnicity, race, and nationality and complicate our ability to generalize what it means for Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) to serve such a diverse student population. Latinidad has also privileged mestizo narratives that obscure enduring colonialities of power and perpetuate the invisibility of Indigenous Peoples. Conceptually framed by Critical Latinx Indigeneities, this study documents the testimonios of 10 Indigenous Mixtec/Ñuu Savi, Zapotec, and Nahua students at HSIs in California. I highlight issues of racialization and Indigenous misrepresentation within Latinx-centered curricula and programming and the ways participants engaged in fugitive acts of learning to claim new forms of visibility on campus. The findings raise important implications for HSIs, including Latinx programming that disrupts colonial perspectives and creates more nuanced understandings of diasporic Indigeneity within Latinx communities.

Removing Faculty: Patterns and Processes of Retrenchment and Restructuring

This article uses 30 years of investigatory and special reports by the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure to understand how retrenchment and restructuring practices have been enacted on ways detrimental to both individual and the corporate faculty. Informed by changes in the logics in higher education and broader understandings of retrenchment, we identified larger patterns of where retrenchment and restructuring in violation of academic norms took place. We further identified three main themes in the reports: Declaring Exigency and / or Launching Restructuring, Faculty Roles and Rights during Retrenchment/Restructuring, and Criteria Used in Removing Faculty. Together, they demonstrate how faculty were excluded from decisions to declare financial exigency or undertake restructuring, denied meaningful roles in enacting changes once exigency or restructuring had been announced, were targeted for removal in violation of tenure rights, and were denied academic due process.

Unequal Civic Development? Vocational Tracking and Civic Outcomes in Germany

Vocational education and training (VET) is a common form of upper secondary school tracking in countries around the world. There are ongoing debates regarding the effects of this differentiation on academic and labor market outcomes; however, evidence on civic outcomes is lacking. Using a unique cohort study in Germany ( N = 2461) and a doubly robust weighting approach with a rich set of baseline covariates to address selection bias, we estimated the effects of VET (relative to academic upper secondary school) on political interest, internal political efficacy, and intent to vote across 15 years of late adolescence and early adulthood. We estimated negative effects of VET on these civic outcomes, particularly as participants grew older. Implications for future research and VET policy are discussed.

Does Diagnostic Feedback Promote Learning? Evidence From a Longitudinal Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment

Assessment for learning emphasizes the importance of feedback to promote learning. To explore whether cognitive diagnostic feedback (CDF) promotes learning and whether it is more effective than traditional feedback in promoting learning, this study conducted a quasi-experiment by utilizing a longitudinal cognitive diagnostic assessment to compare the effect of three feedback modes on promoting learning, including CDF, correct–incorrect response feedback (CIRF), and no feedback. The results provided some evidence for the conclusion that CDF can promote students’ learning and is more effective than CIRF in promoting learning, especially in more challenging areas of knowledge.