Peace through history? The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s inquiry into European schoolbooks, 1921–1924

In 1924 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a volume investigating the teaching of school history in former belligerent states in Europe. The project sought to reconcile former enemies through mutual understanding and educational exchange and reflected a widely held belief that although the military conflict had finished, its ideas still resounded and served to perpetuate antagonism. The CEIP project, conceived in the internationalist spirit, was itself derailed by nationalist enmity, a consequence of the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, demonstrating the limits of cultural reconciliation in the early 1920s, and the resultant volume showed that belligerent views of recent history were still being taught to schoolchildren in France and Germany in the early 1920s.     

“Better to be a pessimist”: A narrative inquiry into mathematics teachers' experience of the transition to the Common Core

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are a focus of state education policy today influencing curriculum implementation and assessment in public schools. The purpose of this narrative inquiry is to understand how high school mathematics teachers experience the transition period. Based on interviews with mathematics teachers in a high school in the Midwest, we aim at bringing teachers' voices to the forefront. Through teachers' stories, we find that: a) Teachers live in the different zones of enactment; and b) Teachers' ecological view of agency should be used as a link to a transition to the CCSS for creating a genuine dialogue. This article is significant in two ways. First, it informs the administrators and policy makers of how there will be inconsistencies across states, districts, schools and classrooms in the implementation and assessment, and second, it helps to explain the need for new professional development approaches.     

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...     

“Walking the Talk”: A Conceptualization of International Mindedness to Inform Leadership in International Schools

In many of the most highly regarded international schools, international mindedness (IM) represents an overarching value orientation and a “mindset” to be developed in students. Over the last 2 decades, there has been increasing attention to both understanding and supporting IM in the explicit and formal curriculum in international schools; however, the theorization of the more implicit or hidden curriculum of international schools has been much less engaged. This article presents a broad conceptualization of IM from a synthesis of the most recent IM literature and, more specifically, digs deeper into the implicit forms of learning and subjectivity via a “post-informed” analysis of a critical anecdote of international school teaching. The article seeks to inform leaders of how they might more robustly understand IM and work to walk the talk of IM through a more open embrace of human difference and cultural conflict under complex, power-laden, and sometimes fraught social relations.     

Weaving the Arts into Jewish Education: Integration at the Blossom School,an Arts‐Based Jewish Day School

The Baltimore Hebrew College

I came to the U.S. from my home town Jerusalem in 1929, when I was 16 years of age. My father had emigrated from Eretz Israel in 1921 because of the severe economic conditions that prevailed after World War I. Gradually, he brought over all the members of his family. He hoped that he and his sons would save enough money in the New World to establish a vital profitable enterprise in Eretz Israel, and the family could then return to its native land. In New York, we lived at first in Brownsville, at that time the most dynamic center of Brooklyn Jewry. A year later, I moved to Baltimore where my father was employed.     

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.     

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.     

A Stylistic Study into the Musicality of the English Translation of the Ancient Chinese Poem “Jianjia”

"Jianjia"("蒹葭"),one of the most famous poems in Shijing(《诗经》), is characterized by balanced sound patterns and euphonious rhythm. Investigation into the stylistic elements in both the source text and the English translation of"Jianjia"shows us the musicality in ancient Chinese poetry and its limits of translatability.