Challenging the Dichotomy Between “Urban” and “Suburban” in Educational Discourse and Policy

Abstract

This article builds a case for nuanced conceptualizations of “urban” and “-suburban” educational contexts and issues. The author analyzes data across two studies—one of upper-middle-class White parents with children in Chicago public schools, and the other of Black low-income and working-class parents who moved from Chicago to a Wisconsin suburb. The findings suggest that monolithic framings of urban and suburban educational issues and populations can mask patterns of inequality within and across particular locales.     

A University–School Partnership to Examine the Adoption and Implementation of the Ohio Community Collaboration Model in One Urban School District: A Mixed-Method Case Study

School improvement models are expanding to incorporate priorities around positive youth development, safe and supportive school climates, school mental health, and school–family community partnerships. A partnership was formed between researchers and district/school leaders to examine the 3-year adoption and implementation of 1 such exemplary model, the Ohio Community Collaboration Model for School Improvement, in a Midwest urban district serving a large number of students at-risk. Researchers and district/school leaders examined what types of system-level capacities developed, and explored student- and school-level outcomes that occurred over the course of implementation. Multiple innovations resulted, such as strengthened policies, improved partnerships and collaborations, and enhanced funding streams. Students' perceptions of academic press, school climate, and academic motivation improved over the 3 years. Academic report cards show progress toward districtwide improvement. Implications are drawn for researchers and school leaders, especially in relation to the design, implementation, and evaluation of collaborative models of school improvement.     

Hegemony of the “Great Equalizer” and the Fragmentation of Common Sense: A Gramscian Model of Inflated Ambitions for Schooling

Increasingly over the past 50 years, the mission statement of schooling in dominant US-American discourse has coalesced around a Great Equalizer narrative of education; that is, it has identified schools as the primary means through which individuals can achieve social mobility. In this article, I employ a Gramscian framework to describe how this dominant yet illusory definition of purpose disorients well-intentioned educational actors and often pits them unwittingly against each other. I show that as a result of a false narrative about what schools do for society, a fragmented common sense has arisen amongst teachers, politicians, scholars and activists to the detriment of a collective theory of change. To guard against fragmentation and avert educational actors' consent to a hegemonic social order, I argue that the first step toward collective resistance is acknowledging the limited impact schools have on the socioeconomic layout of society. Accordingly, educational actors hoping to ameliorate inequality must agree upon more realistic—and less tangible—cultural goals for schooling, such as inculcating critical citizenship and fostering civic participation.     

“Drag Me to the Asylum”: Disguising and Asserting Identities in an Urban School

In many inner-city high schools, students face violence on a regular basis. Authorities contain and curtail the use of weapons and other acts that threaten the individual and the functioning of the institution. These attempts to create a safe environment separate students, who are largely black working class and poor, into criminal and noncriminal categories, creating a labeling system that denies complex individuality. In this article, I demonstrate how teens reaffirmed and subverted harmless/dangerous labels by disguising themselves and creating personas through the use of clothing, graffiti, and poetry. These forms of communication allowed them to achieve anonymity, assert violent identities, and resist dehumanization. Ultimately, I analyze how poetry became a means to explore individual interests, fears, and fantasies. Through personification and metaphor, students articulated and elided psychological and physical constraints despite the monolithic labels of school. Their work often conveyed a subtlety that subverted institutional categories that otherwise reduced them to a single identity. Drag Me to the Asylum emerged from research conducted in and outside a large urban high school. From 1992 until 1997, I collected student poetry, listened to the stories of students and school staff, and taped over 100 hours of unstructured interviews with students and teachers.     

School Context and Charter School Achievement: A Framework for Understanding the Performance “Black Box”

This article explores the relationship between charter school racial composition, school environments, and student achievement. We offer an original framework for understanding school context and its influence on schooling outcomes. We conclude that policymakers could better attend to the persistent educational inequality that has shaped U.S. schooling if when designing school choice plans they took account of student racial composition even in a postdesegregation environment.     

Sensing the Impact of Elementary School Science Reform: A Study of Stakeholder Perceptions of Implementation,Constructivist Strategies,and School–Home Collaboration

This case study of a midwestern school districts reform effort explored the treatment fidelity of the Science: Parents, Activities, and Literature (Science PALs) project. Data were collected from the perspectives of three stakeholders: students, school district, and parents. Students and school district supervisors perceptions indicated that teachers were implementing predicted curricular and instructional features promoted by the Science PALs project. Students perceptions of their current teachers classroom performance did not parallel the supervisors perceptions of the teachers implementation. Parents perceptions and comments indicated a high level of satisfaction with the implemented features. Collectively, the three perspectives suggest that the Science PALs project was successful in changing the classroom practices of K–6 teachers involved in the professional development. The results of this study appear to support the findings of other recent studies that indicate the need for extended professional development and support to fully implement changes in elementary school science instruction.     

School Discipline,Race–Gender and STEM Readiness: A Hierarchical Analysis of the Impact of School Discipline on Math Achievement in High School

The Urban Review - While research on school suspensions and its impact on students is not new, scholars have not yet explored whether there is a link between school suspensions and high school...     

Middle School Choices for Bilingual Latino/A Youth: When the Magnet School Represents “Status” and the Neighborhood School Represents “Solidarity”

Drawing on data collected during the second year of a longitudinal qualitative study that followed over 10 Latino/a bilingual students, this article foregrounds the experiences of participants during their sixth-grade year. The principle data sources included structured and unstructured interviews with teachers and students, school observations, and weekly small-group conversations in a courtyard outside of their classrooms. We focus on the experiences of Leila, Maricela, and Esperanza who were three of the sixth-grade girls actively recruited by their teachers to attend the district’s magnet school program for their upcoming seventh grade-year instead of their neighborhood middle school. We found that much of the reasoning behind their decision-making process centered around issues of status (e.g., how the magnet school offered better academic, economic, and professional opportunities for their future) and solidarity (e.g., attending the neighborhood school with their friends and siblings). In conclusion, we problematize the very nature of these so-called educational ‘choices’ for bilingual Latino/a youth.     

Imagining a Project: Networks,Discourses and Spaces — Towards a New Archaeology of Urban Education

This paper is concerned with the creation of new forms of historical research in education which uses and reflects the changes in methodology and substantive concerns of other disciplines across the shifting boundaries of scholarly work on the social. It is based upon a practice developed out of a series of international seminars and an unfunded research proposal. It is an attempt to use contemporary theory in cultural studies, geography and the sociology of technology to assemble arguments for a new approach to urban education history in which the silences of the field and the method, the restlessness about its boundaries and practices and its contemporary possibilities are collated into a proposal of work. This is called the new archaeology of schooling.     

“A miniature League of Nations”: inquiry into the social origins of the International School, 1924–1930

Today, the International School of Geneva is known as the world’s oldest and largest private international school, having opened in 1924 under the name “International School”. Many schools have attempted to foster an international environment in a general sense; this school is the first to claim an inter-national identity with reference to a specific political ideology. In this article, I argue that neither student statistics, nor official discourse, nor the individual experience of consecrated School founders can account for this claim. After careful analysis of different forms of capital invested in the School, its founding no longer appears to be a simple response to a "need" or a "demand" but a complex process of social distinction.     

“Sense of place” and college placement

It is generally assumed that young people with lower socioeconomic status (SES) face restricted access to higher education institutions, and particularly to those which are considered to be more prestigious. Differences in student placement in higher education institutions by place of residence are usually explained by their SES. We argue that place of residence is not only a geographical attribute, but also a social factor that influences self-identity and plays a significant role in student placement regardless of their SES. The study was conducted in Israel among first year undergraduate students, and analyzed the effect of living in four residential locality types (cities, small towns, Jewish and Arab villages) on institutional placement. The study focused on the patterns of student placement in institutions, controlling for individual SES and previous academic ability. Findings indicate that place of residence has a net effect on student placement, and it interacts with SES and with previous academic achievements. Less “successful” students, regardless of their SES, are less influenced by their residential locality. These differences in college placement are explained in part by the place of residence, which represents a way of life that creates a shared “sense of place” or “habitus” based on locality.     

A Review of: ““Doing School”: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out,Materialistic, and Miseducated Students”

The views of Jewish education articulated by Rosenzweig in his essays “It is Time” and in “The Opening of the Lehrhaus” are quite different. So different, in fact, that an account of how one mind can produce such different accounts is necessary. Following the lead of a 1950’s popular television quiz show, the authors ask “Will the Real Franz Rosenzweig Please Stand Up?” The authors end by exploring how the tensions within Rosenzweig's educational thinking can yield new insights into the contemporary challenges of Jewish education.