This conceptual paper expands Asian critical (AsianCrit) theory by introducing a new tenet— challenging linguistic racism —to foreground language as both a mechanism of racial oppression and a site of resistance to racism. While AsianCrit has illuminated how white supremacy shapes Asian (American) racialization, it has yet to theorize the role of language in these processes. Drawing on a raciolinguistic perspective, the challenging linguistic racism tenet bridges race and language in AsianCrit to better account for the ways language and language ideologies sustain and disrupt racial hierarchies. This expansion advances interdisciplinary understandings of race, language, and power, offering researchers, educators, and policymakers a framework for confronting white supremacy and promoting racially and linguistically just education.
Race-related content in the school curriculum is a subject of renewed political and policy attention. But what racial topics do Americans support students learning about, and what racial beliefs predict their views? This article reports on a large probability-based survey of American households on these topics. We find opposition to most racial topics in elementary schools and support in high schools as well as large partisan gaps on many specific topics. Certain attitudinal items—most notably valuing diverse contributions and concern about White students feeling guilty—are strongly predictive of partisan gaps. These findings provide much needed light for a debate that has animated substantial political controversy in recent years, suggesting paths forward for a more inclusive curriculum.
This essay provides a concise historical overview of U.S.-based abolition within a longue durée of struggle, paired with its conceptual and theoretical refashioning in subsequent centuries. I then interrogate the nearly nascent, yet robust, abolition theorizing and the attempted linguistic cementing of it within education research. Ultimately, I make a heretical case for continued fomenting of abolitionist studies in education, keepin’ it legit, and doing so through an echo of intellectual demands, cautions, guidance, and commitments requiring scholars to offer political clarity, rather than mere definitional certainty, in their/our engagement with it.
This study conducts a comprehensive analysis of research on artificial intelligence (AI) for social–emotional learning (SEL) from 2004 to 2025. Using Bibliometrix and VOSviewer, it examined 465 publications from the Web of Science database to track development trends, research hotspots, and research foci. Findings reveal a notable rise in publications, underscoring increasing scholarly attention to integrating AI in SEL. Key domains identified include machine learning–based emotion recognition, immersive technologies for SEL, and AI chatbots for emotional support. This study also identifies leading authors and publications, offering strategic guidance for future research. Overall, this study provides a comprehensive framework for the integration of AI in SEL, helping educators and policymakers navigate the opportunities and challenges of leveraging AI for SEL.
Mixed methods research is increasingly used to study educational inequities, yet its potential to serve as a transformative approach remains underarticulated, particularly in higher education. Drawing on the transformative paradigm and foundational mixed methods scholarship, this essay conceptualizes transformative mixed methods research (TMMR) as an orienting framework that guides how researchers approach study design, knowledge production, and the integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches in pursuit of justice and social change. Using higher education, including community colleges, as a generative context, the essay articulates core considerations and practices of TMMR that move mixed methods inquiry beyond methodological pluralism toward transformative engagement. In doing so, it positions TMMR as a way of aligning how we study inequity with how we seek to transform it.
India’s multilingual classrooms require more than formal language policy; they require communicative pedagogies that enable equitable participation in learning. Although India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 emphasizes mother tongue instruction, implementation often overlooks how teachers steer through linguistic diversity in practice. This essay reviews emerging research on teacher-student communication across Indian classrooms, foregrounding adaptive strategies such as translanguaging, visual scaffolding, and peer mediation. These practices, although essential, remain undervalued in teacher education and curriculum design. Introducing the framework of “communicative justice,” the essay argues that meaningful inclusion requires recognizing students’ linguistic repertoires and supporting teachers’ communicative agency. It calls for systemic investment in multilingual pedagogy, inclusive assessment, and discourse-based research to align policy with classroom realities.
This study examined the development of achievement differences by gender from kindergarten through fifth grade using data from almost 12 million U.S. students across nine kindergarten cohorts. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, girls entered school ahead in both subjects, but their math advantage has diminished over time. Boys consistently surpassed girls in math skills during elementary school, while girls maintained a steady lead in reading. These findings challenge assumptions about an early schooling disadvantage for boys and highlight persistent, subject-specific gender gaps. We argue for targeted instructional strategies to support boys’ reading development and counteract stereotypes that may hinder girls’ math achievement.
As international student mobility increases, research on students’ experiences with race and racism has expanded. However, much of current scholarship relies heavily on U.S.-based racial theories, often neglecting how race operates fluidly across global contexts. This conceptual article revisits the concept of “race” by extending critical race theory and raciolinguistics beyond U.S. and Western borders to examine racism and racialization as global phenomena. It argues that international students’ racial identities are shaped by preexisting racial discourses in their home countries, reinforced by global structures of racialized power, and continuously reshaped as they navigate transnational social fields. By broadening the theoretical scope of race, this article highlights the need for a globally inclusive race framework in international student research.
Brown v. Board of Education has played a central role in imagining educational justice in the United States. However, the lessons that we should draw from school desegregation is contested terrain, and desegregation efforts have largely failed both to grapple with the country’s multiracial constituency and to offer a positive vision for schools. In this essay, we use theoretical conceptualizations of justice, relational theories of race, and research literature to offer a more robust vision of public schooling for a multiracial democracy. This multidimensional, situated, and relational framework is one powerful tool for those designing research, policies, and practices that help us move toward multiracial democracy.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected students in segregated Black and Latine communities, highlighting the need for equitable workload and resources for teachers to support these students effectively. Analyzing the 2020-2021 National Teacher and Principal Survey data and guided by a critical quantitative framework, we found that teachers in predominantly Black and Latine schools had heavier workloads and were given less adequate resources than their counterparts in predominantly White schools, especially when they were teaching hybrid. We also found that teachers with hybrid instruction in predominantly Black and Latine schools who received more adequate resources were less likely to be dissatisfied and express their intention to leave teaching. Policy and leadership implications in times of crisis are discussed.
Gulino v. Board of Education is a class action employment discrimination lawsuit awarding approximately $1.8 billion to over 5,200 Black and Latine teachers in New York City in response to a racially discriminatory teacher licensure exam. This essay explores Gulino as an attempt at assessment reparation. Using frameworks of harm and constructive-based repair, the essay examines the harm-based logic of the ruling that provides restitution for individual teachers but does not reduce the broader discriminatory pattern of licensure systems. We then explore how a constructive approach to repair might have worked, and might still work, through participatory policy analysis, community answerability, and antiracist assessment. We apply insights from Gulino to current policy shifts loosening teacher licensure requirements and potential lawsuits against edTPA.
Fenton’s article, “Reconsidering the Use of Oral Exams and Assessments: An Old Way to Move Into a New Future,” argues that oral assessment can restore authenticity and support academic integrity in the generative artificial intelligence era. Drawing on this synthesis, this letter offers three refinements to enable adoption at scale: operationalize equity by separating language production from disciplinary reasoning and providing targeted accommodations; bolster validity and reliability by constraining examiner behavior through standardization, recording, and interrater checks; and enhance feasibility via a scalable “viva-lite” oral verification appended to selected tasks.
In recent years, the far-right movement in education, characterized by anti-critical race theory, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-woke campaigns and policies, has gathered steam, threatening to roll back hard-won advances in educational justice, including diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; detracking efforts; student success initiatives for Black and Latinx students; culturally responsive curriculum; ethnic studies; and social-emotional learning programs. The research available on these most recent far-right movements is understandably limited. That said, many education scholars are attempting to study the current wave of far-right activity. To take stock of what these scholars have learned, we conducted a systematic search of the literature, which yielded 80 empirical studies. We review the empirical literature we found and propose a broader, multidimensional research agenda.
Extending findings from a 26-year longitudinal study of educational opportunity, we examine whether opportunities are related to the educational attainment and earnings of children from lower-income households ( n = 226) as a function of when in a child’s development they occur. We compare the predictive power of opportunities accrued within three key developmental stages—early childhood, middle childhood, or adolescence—with the combined power of opportunities accrued across these stages. Our findings point to the value of educational opportunity in all three stages, particularly for educational attainment.
The 70th anniversary of the Brown decision provides an opportunity to shed light on the story of Black educators who were recruited to schools on the Navajo Nation after being fired in the transition to desegregated schooling. With the support of the Navajo Tribal Council, the 1954 Navajo Emergency Education Program established funds to create additional schools throughout the Navajo Nation. Contacted through Black newspaper and magazine advertisements and direct recruitment, hundreds of Black teachers, displaced from schools throughout the South, ended up at schools like Chinle Boarding School. We share one former student’s story and contextualize it within the broader Brown historiography.
Children’s testimonial learning undergoes a developmental shift from credulity bias to selective trust. Whereas young children tend to accept others’ testimony without question, they gradually learn to evaluate its credibility based on cues, such as the speaker’s accuracy, expertise, and contextual reliability. Drawing on research in developmental psychology, this article challenges the romanticized view of children as autonomous learners, highlighting the crucial role of testimony in learning, and further argues that testimonial learning is also shaped by sociopolitical contexts.
Despite growing interest in education for children in conflict and crisis (CAC) settings, evidence on how these children learn and develop—and how best to support them—remains limited. The fragmented research landscape across disciplinary traditions and sectoral silos limits holistic understanding and actionable insights to inform policies and programs. By focusing on four drivers of learning and development—access, quality, continuity, and coherence—the Education Research in Conflict and Crisis (ERICC) framework maps educational processes across local, regional, national, and global levels linking children’s experiences with system-level dynamics. Integrating diverse evidence into a coherent analytic structure, the framework provides a foundation for strengthening education system responses in CACs and generating systematic, actionable knowledge that enriches the global evidence base.
We study guidance counselors by examining how they influence enrollment in Advanced Placement courses. We examine the proportion of students enrolled across different racial and ethnic groups and whether the student-counselor ratio is related to the size of these enrollments. We also consider whether schools with lower ratios have a smaller enrollment gap between White students and students of color. We examine these questions using restricted national data. Our findings show that ease of access to counselors is associated with higher proportions of enrollment for White students and sometimes also for Black students but infrequently for Latino and Asian students. Greater ease of access is also associated with a smaller enrollment gap between White and Black students.
Although YouTube is widely used worldwide, little is known about how pre-K-12 teachers employ it for instructional purposes. This article reports findings from a national survey of U.S. pre-K-12 teachers (N = 393) on their instructional use of YouTube. Nearly three-quarters of respondents reported using the platform as a classroom resource, with almost half doing so at least daily or weekly. On average, teachers devoted 17.9% of instructional time to watching videos, often alongside lectures, group work, and independent practice. These findings underscore YouTube's important role in supporting instruction and enhancing teachers' content knowledge.
