Purpose: This study provides a comprehensive portrait of nonstructural student mobility in California, examining its overall incidence, how it varies across racial/ethnic and socioeconomic subgroups, and which school-level characteristics function as "push" and "pull" factors driving school changes. Research Methods/Approach: Using rich longitudinal administrative data from a sample of large, diverse California school districts, we employ a sending-school incidence framework to distinguish summer nonstructural moves from midyear moves and structural transitions. We model the school-level and student-level predictors of each move type and estimate predicted probabilities of mobility as a function of differences in school achievement, racial congruence, and residential mobility across race/ethnicity and free and reduced-price lunch eligibility subgroups. Findings: Low school achievement, high school poverty, elevated absenteeism, and other markers of poor school quality function as significant push factors. High achievement acts as a pull factor for all students, as does moving toward a less racially congruent-typically more diverse-school. Summer nonstructural mobility appears more strategic than midyear mobility, which rarely leads to better schools for any group. Residential mobility enables moves into higher-quality schools for all families, but this effect is substantially stronger for Asian American, Filipino or Pacific Islander and White students than for Black and Latinx students. Implications: Systemic barriers-including residential segregation, restrictive attendance zones, and historical housing discrimination-appear to limit the ability of low-income Black and Latinx families to leverage residential and school mobility into improved academic conditions. Policies aimed at reducing inequitable mobility patterns should attend to these constraints.
Purpose: Racial homophily-the tendency to form ties with same-race colleagues-is common in workplace networks, including schools. But we know less about how it varies across relationship types and organizational racial composition. We examine racial homophily in teachers' instructional advice, disciplinary advice, and friendship networks, comparing Black and White teachers in majority-White and majority-Black schools. Research Methods/Approach: Using pooled network models across four schools, we find that homophily patterns vary systematically by tie type and context. Findings: In instructional advice networks, White teachers show same-race homophily in both majority-White and majority-Black faculty contexts, whereas Black teachers do not show a clear same-race pattern in either context. In disciplinary advice networks, both groups show context-sensitive homophily: Black teachers show homophily in both contexts but more strongly in majority-White schools, whereas White teachers show homophily only in majority-Black schools. In friendship networks, Black and White teachers show homophily in both contexts, and for both groups, it is stronger when they are in the numerical minority. Implications: These findings show that racial boundary-making in schools is not uniform; it depends on the social content of ties and the organizational composition in which those ties form.
Purpose: The researchers examine how parents' rights groups gain power and how authoritarianism may spread and be received in educational settings. We analyzed US news reporting on parents' rights activism leading up to the 2024 election and immediately after it, how local place and leaning of news sources inform production of news on parents' rights activism, how news sources framed messages about parents' rights activism in light of the outcomes of the 2024 election, and how teachers, families, and children are positioned within media discourses. Research Methods/Approach: We used ethnographic content analysis of frames and discourses in eight major US newspapers across pre-to-post-2024 presidential election periods. Findings: Parents' rights activists and media tend to use "flood the zone" strategies promoting extremist school politics. Only two parents' rights groups received consistent coverage but monopolized reporting. Countermovement groups worked against the grain but received limited space in news cycles. Subthemes highlighted these key frames for representing parents' rights groups' roles in the authoritarian age of politics: including right-wing mothers' omnipresence in the news, silencing of countermovement groups, and protection and promotion of elite White heteropatriarchy. The roles of silence and representation of children, families, and teachers in promoting parents' rights as well as news influence on communities are discussed, along with strategies for undermining parents' rights. Implications: By studying right-wing women and news representing them, we can gain greater awareness of silences, areas of contestation, and strategies to interrupt threats that parents' rights bring to public education.
Purpose: A large body of research has studied the dynamics of school choice for racially minoritized students in the United States. An emerging body of research has considered the racial and ethnic differences in school choice opportunities and experiences among racially minoritized groups. In this mixed-methods study, I examine school choice in Detroit and stratified enrollment by socioeconomic status, with specific attention to whether and why the patterns of enrollment stratification differ between Black and Hispanic students in the city. Research Methods/Approach: I used a sequential explanatory mixed-methods research design, starting with a representative survey to measure socioeconomically stratified enrollment among Detroit students and then conducting semistructured interviews with Black and Hispanic parents or guardians as well as school and district leaders to identify factors that helped explain the quantitative results. Findings: I find greater stratification of enrollment by socioeconomic status among Black students than among Hispanic students. Among Black students, neighborhood schools enroll more students in deep poverty than charter schools, and selective schools enroll a distinctly advantaged group of Black students. Hispanic students, however, are not stratified by socioeconomic status between neighborhood schools and charters, and those who enroll in selective schools are not as socioeconomically distinct. These differences appear to be the result of the distinct sociospatial contexts for most Hispanic students compared with most Black students, rather than divergent preferences or cultural differences. Implications: These findings highlight the centrality of sociospatial contexts for understanding racial and ethnic differences in patterns of school choice among racially minoritized groups of students.
Purpose: In this article, we examine the experiences of adjunct faculty in the community college sector and analyze how they use dominant institutional logics to rationalize their decision making and behaviors. We pay particular attention to how adjunct faculty converge dominant institutional logics to explain, and in many instances produce, the disparities they experience. Research Methods/Approach: For this qualitative study, we analyzed interviews from 25 community college adjunct faculty in California, which is the largest community college sector in the United States. Findings: We found that adjuncts in our sample decided to teach in the community college sector because they believed they could make a difference in the educational trajectories of racially diverse students, those attending underresourced schools, or students previously underserved but motivated to learn. However, we also found that adjunct faculty encountered challenges rooted in state and capitalist logics that dehumanized them. Moreover, adjunct faculty experienced tensions between their desire to make a difference and their sense of being exploited by full-time faculty, administrators, and the community college system. Implications: This research contributes to our understanding of the relationship between societal institutional logics and everyday experiences of community college adjunct faculty. It provides empirical evidence for implementing accountability structures to improve adjuncts' working conditions.
Purpose: Although the promise of educational technology initiatives has long been touted as a means of innovation and improvement in schools, results of these efforts are mixed at best. Theorizing that institutional factors may be shaping these outcomes, this study identified logics, or belief systems, underlying educational technology reform efforts. In doing so, we respond to calls to better understand how technology can foster organizational change and how institutional logics may shape this process. Research Methods/Approach: Using content analysis, we examined newspapers, messages from professional organizations, and documentation from state departments of education for more than 15 years prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2004-19) to identify logics of educational technology operating in public discourse in New England. Findings: We find four logics of educational technology reform: the neoliberal, control, danger, and transformation logics. The neoliberal, control, and danger logics motivated technological reforms that served to replicate existing structures and practices in schools. In contrast, the transformation logic offered opportunities for change by forwarding technology-based reform practices that served to challenge the grammar of schooling. Implications: By uncovering these logics, we offer those working in schools and school systems a new tool to understand apparent stagnation of technology reform efforts and, perhaps, provide opportunities to facilitate a better and more equitable path forward.
Purpose: For decades, researchers studying teachers' biases have documented the consequences of teachers' deficit mindsets about students, particularly when white teachers work with students of color. Despite substantial investment, teacher education has not always ameliorated those biases. This study examines what tacit messages about students are contained within teacher educators' (TEs) messages about instructional practices and teacher candidates' discussions during methods courses. Research Methods: This comparative study of six English-language arts and social studies methods courses in the United States took place in three urban teacher certification institutions with differing pedagogical perspectives. Informed by critical discourse analysis, this study looks across those settings to develop a holistic portrait of how novices are being primed to encounter student knowledge, thinking, and identity. Findings: Analysis showed that TEs played an important role in framing candidates' discussion of students, even when those conversational prompts were inexplicit. TEs frequently initiated discussions of students and tended to emphasize students' intelligence but rarely explored their knowledge or social identities. Preservice teachers largely followed their instructors' lead, only occasionally using their lived experience to reframe discussions. Implications: If TEs shape candidates' thinking about students, it will be important for future practice and research to consider more equitable ways to coconstruct teaching and students. Methods courses work at the intersection of theory and practice and provide an opportunity for TEs to have the opportunity to inform novices' ideas about who urban students are and how they ought to be taught.
Purpose: Federal academic earmarks represent a revealing site to examine the racialized dynamics of higher education funding policy. Considering this and drawing on the concept of racialized change work, the present QuantCrit study investigates mechanisms underlying the racialized distribution of academic earmarks, including relative partisanship and racialized congressional caucus membership, by the two main US political parties. Research Methods/Approach: We constructed a novel data set using federal earmark data from fiscal years 2022 and 2023 matched to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the Cook Partisan Voting Index, and caucus membership rosters. Leveraging this data set, we examine the extent to which Democrats and Republicans differ in their distribution of earmarks across higher education, including between white-serving institutions (WSIs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) as well as among MSIs. We also examine the extent to which racialized partisanship and congressional caucuses predict this distribution, beyond party affiliation. Findings: The two major US political parties allocate earmarks distinctly. Republicans disproportionately sponsor earmarks to WSIs, whereas Democrats are committed to funding MSIs even as they sponsor far less generous earmarks on average. Beyond party, relative partisanship matters in the assignment of these benefits, with Right-leaning political contexts correlating with an outsized preference for whiter institutions. Implications: This study highlights missed opportunities on the part of both parties to use earmarks to build MSIs' capacity and support low-income students, underscoring the importance of more strategic, intentional funding and lobbying to shape earmark allocations.
Purpose: This study examines coteachers' use of student data for decision making and addresses three questions: (1) What types of student data do coteachers use and for what purposes? (2) In what ways do general and special education coteachers approach data similarly or differently in the coteaching process? (3) What contextual factors affect coteachers' use of data? Research Methods: This qualitative study used prompted recall interviews to gather data from four coteaching dyads working in high-need classrooms across elementary, middle, and high school levels. Findings: This study found high levels of collaboration in coassessment and coplanning, with strong agreement within and across dyads on the value and validity of data. Two conditions seemed to facilitate this collaboration: the perception of shared ownership for all students and the presence of similar sources of data for all students. Findings also highlight the importance of data features on teachers' data use. Teachers reported revisiting results from a discontinued assessment because its format provided valuable information for instructional planning. Implications: Our study reveals a high-level collaboration around data use and complementary perspectives on data use, contrasting with the extant interpretation of coteaching practices characterized by the predominance of the "one teach/one assist" model that suggests unequal roles. This points to the need for future research on coteachers' use of student achievement data and a deeper understanding of collaborative practices. Schools and districts should provide support and training on data use and instruction for coteaching contexts and consider the usability of data for instructional planning.
Purpose: Although research has investigated the influence of teachers' unions on PK-12 school systems over several decades, the impact of reduced union power on students remains underexplored. This study addresses the limited and mixed evidence on how statewide teachers' union reforms affect student academic outcomes. By examining comprehensive union reforms in two Midwestern states, we seek to clarify the broader consequences of weakening union power and to illuminate the mechanisms-such as staffing and resource shifts-through which these reforms shape student achievement. Research Methods/Approach: We used a difference-in-differences design with district-level longitudinal data from Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio from 2009 through 2013. Findings: Our investigation revealed that statewide union reforms were statistically associated with lower student test scores, with a greater decline in districts serving a high concentration of Black and Hispanic students. The lower test scores were partially explained by concurrent reductions in district expenditure on instruction. Implications: This study suggests that weakening teachers' unions may reduce instructional resources and eventually harm student learning. Researchers should continue investigating the mechanisms linking union reforms to educational outcomes, and policy makers should consider proactive and complementary investments to prevent unintended negative effects on students, particularly in disadvantaged districts, when designing or implementing union-related policy changes.
Purpose: This research examines how national actors, like Moms for Liberty (M4L), used the politics of disruption to challenge existing school leaders and reshape local education politics. Research Methods: Using a comparative case study approach, we examine school board meetings in 15 districts (156 meetings) to understand how the presence/absence of nationalized issues and national groups shape local education politics. We compare four case types: M4L-endorsed candidates win the majority of board seats (three cases), M4L-endorsed candidates win a minority of board seats (three cases), Nationalized-Issue presence (six cases), and comparison cases (three cases) with neither nationalized issues nor M4L present. Using an observation protocol, we track changes in engagement, tone, and rules/processes across three time periods: "pre-period" (late 2019 to early 2020), "contentious period" (summer of 2021 through 2022 elections), and "post-period" (after the 2022 elections). Findings: The politics of disruption motivated new actors to engage in board meetings. Attendees engaged in ways that broke with long-standing behavioral norms, mirroring the current style of national politics. Negativity, insults, and even threats to elected leaders grew in frequency, leading to polarization and an us-versus-them atmosphere. To quell the disruption, boards rigidly applied old and new rules in ways that fueled the narrative of unresponsive boards. Implications: This article contributes to the growing body of literature on the nationalization of local education politics. Although increased engagement and accountability from the community might be a positive outcome, our findings show how the politics of disruption can sow distrust and effectively stymie regular governance procedures.
Purpose: This study investigates the relationship between the degree of authoritarianism and the World Bank's (WB) promotion of decentralization reforms in educational systems across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where rigidly centralized institutions are often seen as barriers to improved educational outcomes. Research Methods: Drawing on original country-level panel data from 1965 to 2019 covering 99 LMICs, the analysis employs fixed-effects models with additional robustness checks to examine how regime type influences the WB's decentralization agenda. Findings: The analysis shows a significant association between higher levels of authoritarianism and the WB's promotion of decentralization reforms, which suggests that authoritarian regimes, characterized by highly centralized education systems, are more likely to be targeted by such reforms. Implications: These findings highlight that in authoritarian settings, decentralization may function not only as a governance reform but also as a political signal that allows regimes to align with international expectations, secure funding, or enhance legitimacy. More broadly, they show that the diffusion of reforms by international organizations depends not only on global agendas but also on the political structures of recipient countries.
Purpose: Given the current political polarization, historical disenfranchisement, and racial tensions in this country, universities should consider how they respond to political events. Although many universities claim civic goals as part of their educational mission, they adopt neutral postures in their institutional responses, but how neutrality affects student-of-color political learning and engagement at Minority-Serving and Emerging Institutions (MSIs) is not well understood. Research Methods: We chose a multisite case study to consider how MSIs are similar in their approach to institutional response. An embedded case study design was selected to highlight two subunits within each case: student perspective and leadership rationale. Findings: In this paper, we argue that universities' self-proclaimed attempts at neutral postures impede young people's political learning and shirk universities' commitment to equitable academic outcomes and education for an engaged democracy. Our findings highlight that this occurs through a practice of neutral responses, which are viewed by students as either performative or nonperformative, negatively affecting the campus racial climate. We assert that free speech is not a form of deliberative democratic dialogue. In fact, deliberative democratic dialogue is something much more uncomfortable that universities must be willing to model and teach their students so they may engage in a participatory democracy. Implications: Universities' apolitical approach models say nothing but expect students to exchange ideas that they know to be contentious and distressing. Universities should promote conversations that urge us to enact different and radical forms of democracy through a political pedagogy.
Purpose: In Copenhagen, Denmark, a city with many public and private school options, the public schools (folkeskole) span grades 0-9, with children looping with the same students and teachers. This model can develop cohesive classrooms that have the potential to support school integration in diverse but gentrifying areas. Yet, school choice policies make it easier for parents to leave early. While researchers have documented why privileged parents choose to enroll their children in public schools, the decision to stay in later grades is undertheorized. Research Methods: Using a case study design, we conducted interviews with 17 white, privileged parents to explore the role that their choices play in school integration, examining what factors contribute to them staying or leaving early for choice options and the consequences for integration. Findings: Parents in our sample made a series of ongoing decisions around school choice, with most initially choosing their assigned folkeskole. Yet, despite the strengths of the classroom community, many obstacles to creating long-term school integration exist, including a domino effect that occurs when parents exit, or consider exiting, for school choice options in the later elementary years. This phenomenon of choosing then leaving is what we have called "fragile integration." Implications: Our research shows how ongoing school choice undermines school integration, even when parents opt in to diverse public schools. As students leave in the older grades, the integration in public school classrooms can be fragile, leading to inequities in access to opportunities and unintended challenges for the children left behind.
Purpose: Instructional system coherence plays an important role in sustaining high-quality learning environments. Though it is acknowledged that instructional systems are dynamic and relational, most research quantifies coherence in terms of its overall presence (or absence) in the learning environment. In this study, we investigate whether a network-based approach that accounts for the relational nature of system coherence can yield new insights into teachers' perceptions of instructional systems. Methods: We analyzed survey data from a multistate sample of K-12 English language arts (ELA) teachers using methods adapted from network analysis. These methods allow us to visualize coherence more holistically by illustrating the ties between different components of teachers' instructional systems that give them messages about what and how to teach. Findings: We found that teachers perceived relatively high levels of instructional system coherence, though there was disagreement among teachers within schools. We found structural differences in how coherence is perceived and identified five main profiles of instructional system coherence. When we relate these profiles to contextual conditions hypothesized to be associated with coherence, we find that several profiles associate similarly with preconditions. Implications: Our findings illustrate ways that relational measures of instructional system coherence can characterize not only how many instructional system components are perceived to be similar or reinforcing but also which components may have strongly reinforcing relationships, and which may have weaker or conflicting relationships. Such insights could lead to the formulation of new theories of how coherence influences teaching and learning and may inform school improvement strategies.
