The St. Louis Voluntary Desegregation program, and its corollary, the Interdistrict Transfer Plan, have existed in some form since 1983. At its height, approximately 13,000 Black students from the city of St. Louis transferred into predominantly White and suburban school districts, representing the largest voluntary desegregation plan in the United States. County and school district leaders responsible for the plan have slowly reduced the number of Black transfer students, and a November 2016 agreement extended the plan for a five-year period to allow about 1,000 new students to enroll through the 2023–2024 school year. Emanating from qualitative interviews with 37 Black former students who participated in the plan between 1983 and 2018 (Waves 1–4), this article captures participants’ experiences, agency, their struggles, and solidarity efforts to ensure their chances of surviving and succeeding in schooling contexts that drastically differed from their home and community environments. Given the impending ending of this plan at the end of the 2023–2024 school year, findings provide implications for research, educational policy and reform, and schooling practices that create and sustain culturally affirming and educationally enriching environments for Black students.

Researchers are increasingly paying closer attention to the geography of educational opportunity, particularly the role of race and place in shaping people’s educational experiences and outcomes (Diamond et al., 2021; Morris & Monroe, 2009; Morris & Woodruff, 2015; Posey-Maddox, 2017; Tate, 2008). The city of St. Louis—known for being a northern city with Southern culture—provides a significant, symbolic but often overlooked context (place) for understanding and examining urban education reform in the United States. I first came to know the city in the mid-late 1990s when I traveled between Nashville, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri, to work as a graduate assistant on a research project led by highly regarded scholars Ellen Goldring and Claire Smrekar of Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. Professors Goldring and Smrekar had received funding from the Spencer Foundation to understand school choice, particularly magnet schools, in three different cities, one of which included St. Louis (Goldring & Smrekar, 2000; Smrekar & Goldring, 1999). While carving out my niche on the research project and eventually a dissertation topic, I was particularly intrigued by one Black school community in St. Louis —Farragut Elementary School located in the historic Ville neighborhood. Beyond Farragut’s shiny hardwood floors and immaculate hallways, I was in awe of the sense of pride the school’s staff created with the community and the powerful relationships forged over decades among the mostly Black teachers, students, and families. Farragut Elementary School embodied elements of the kind of schoolcommunity that led to academic excellence that Black people experienced in the segregated South (Anderson, 1988; Jones, 1981; Savage, 1998; Siddle Walker, 1996, 2000). Quite often, the narrative related to Black schooling during that time, and even today, painted a sordid picture of Black K-12 educational institutions. Farragut’s faculty, staff, students, and their parents’ experiences and outcomes; however, countered this pervasive perspective. Yet, few researchers studied academically highperforming schools like Farragut and its intrinsic presence of what I would later come to define as communally bonded schooling (Morris, 1999, 2004, 2009). Between 1997 and 2015—while working as a professor at the University of Georgia and researching a school community in Atlanta, Georgia, that also displayed communally bonded schooling—I stayed abreast of Farragut Elementary School in St. Louis. I periodically visited the school and paid attention to the changes in the school that would begin to unravel what I had captured in an American Educational Research Journal article “Can Anything Good Come from Nazareth? African American schooling and community in the Urban South and Midwest” (Morris, 2004). Though not exhaustive, some of Farragut’s changes included the principal’s death, the retirement of Black teachers and the hiring of Teach for America teachers, the growth of charter schools, and the lack of investment in the community surrounding the school. Once considered an exemplary school on almost every measure of achievement, Farragut Elementary School had quickly become a shell of its former self. The school was closed in 2021 by district administrators due to purported low student enrollment, underachievement, and fiscal concerns (Morris, 2021).

On November 14th, 2022, a group of Black community leaders from the Saint Louis, Missouri, area met to discuss their experiences with the serious issues surrounding urban schools in their communities. Although this discussion is specific to a particular time and place, the concerns expressed, and solutions, offered are transferrable to many other communities in the United States. Dr. Adrienne Dixson moderated the discussion. This article is a verbatim transcription of their discussion with minor edits to facilitate ease of readability. The voices of the participants have been preserved. (Adrienne Dixson = AD; Dionne Ferguson = DF; Jacquelyn Lewis-Harris = JLH; Art McCoy = AMC; Cynthia Chapple = CC; Aaron Williams = AW).

Whereas increased scholarly attention is focusing on contemporary school closings, noticeably absent is the placement of this scholarship within the historical context of Black people’s social experiences. This paradigm shift would reveal a much longer history that has had devastating consequences for Black people. In this article, we identify five waves of Black school closings and provide contemporary case studies that reveal an ongoing pattern resulting in the destabilization of Black communities across time and space. Despite persistent attacks on these institutions, our analyses capture Black people’s resistance and agency in maintaining their communities and schools. In addition to providing policy implications, we further suggest the term Black community-killing as a theoretical way of thinking about the consequences of school closings.

Background Many individuals comprise a nursing mother's social support network. Grandmothers within African American families, historically, have played a vital role in the transmission of culture. Understanding intergenerational perspectives within African American families related to infant feeding and scholarship about breastfeeding is critical, given the breastfeeding patterns among African American women. Research aim To describe intergenerational perspectives within African American families, where the mother has successfully breastfed. Methods A prospective, cross-sectional, qualitative design using semi-structured interviews was used. African American nursing mothers and maternal grandmothers (N = 14) residing in the Metro-St. Louis area, who reflected economic and educational diversity, were recruited. Inductive and iterative data analysis, framed by Black Feminist Theory allowed for emerging patterns reflecting the participants' voices. Results Three of the six (50%) grandmother participants had breastfed. The majority of the mother participants were married (n = 5; 62.5%) and had a college degree (n = 4; 50.0%) or a high school diploma (n = 1; 12.5%); and four (50.0%) had received the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Three patterns emerged: (a) intergenerational connections; (b) changes in breastfeeding experiences over time; and (c) going with the flow (referring to the choice to work within the constraints of one's circumstances). Grandmothers supported mothers' breastfeeding decisions; grandmothers who had breastfed benefited from the updated information the mothers provided; and grandmothers who did not breastfeed acquired new breastfeeding knowledge, which informed the ways they supported the mothers. Conclusion The intergenerational perspectives surrounding breastfeeding within African American families participating in this study offer future research directions.

Background/Context The corpus of scholarship on Black male students who play sports focuses on students at the collegiate level, thus ignoring the regional, neighborhood, and K–12 educational backgrounds and experiences of these young people before some matriculate into a college or university. This omission suggests the need for more robust investigations that (a) focus on Black males during K–12 schooling, (b) place Black male students’ experiences within the larger geographic (e.g., regions, neighborhoods and schools) and social and historical contexts in which they live and go to school, and thereby, (c) seek to understand how these contexts shape students’ experiences and beliefs about race and the role of academics and athletics in their lives and future. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study We investigated two research questions: (1) For Black male students who play high school sports, how do the social contexts shape their experiences and their beliefs about race and the role of academics and athletics in their lives and future? (2) And, what are the consequences of Black male students’ experiences and beliefs for their academic and athletic outcomes? This investigation across geographically and economically contrasting cities, neighborhoods, and schools in the U.S. South (metro Atlanta, Georgia) and Midwest (Chicago, Illinois) offers empirical, theoretical, and practice-related evidence about young Black males’ experiences and beliefs about race, academics, and athletics, while providing a window into the complex social and cultural worlds in which they live, go to school, and play sports. Research Design This article emanates from research studies that employed ethnographic research methods such as interviews and observations, while embedding the researchers within the communities where Black people resided. The research design used a cross-case analysis to investigate participants’ experiences and beliefs. The constant comparative method allowed for the synthesizing of data collected from two different research sites. Description of Main Findings Key findings revealed the importance for researchers to consider place and its implication in the experiences of Black male students who play sports, particularly their perceptions of the role of academics, athletics, and race in their lives. Conclusions/Recommendations This article moves the scholarly understanding of the study of Black male “students who play sports” forward by illuminating the centrality of places, whether a particular country, region, city, neighborhood, or school—in shaping participants’ experiences and beliefs. We offer insights for research, theory, and practice.

In this chapter, we treat historical documents/artifacts and archival records as entrance points into examinations of education using Critical Race Theory (CRT). The methodological approach described relies heavily on locating the significance of both the existence and absence of documentation as source material, and the researcher’s interpretation of that documentation or lack thereof. While archival records represent transactions, and related historical documents and manuscripts provide additional information regarding those dealings, this chapter explores how those resources intersect with issues of race and power with educational research. Borrowing historiographic methods, the research process from collection to dissemination is diagrammed in a way that optimizes the use of CRT in educational and historical scholarship. Contextualized through the theoretical lens of CRT, educational research by way of archival records and historical documents is unpacked in the revelation of power, politics, race, and class.

This review of research examines classroom conversations about race with a theoretical framing oriented to understanding how such conversations may disrupt social and educational inequalities. The review covers research on how classroom conversations on race contribute to students’ and educators’ understandings of a racialized society, their construction of and reflection on relationships among students, as well as to their learning of academic content knowledge. The review considers research across grades P–12, as well as conversations in teacher education, with a specific focus on the U.S. context. Limiting the review to the U.S. context is done not to obfuscate conceptions of race and inequalities globally, but to elucidate how race becomes manifested in unique ways in the United States—often positioning African Americans and Blackness as the “fundamental other.” The review offers a social, historical, and political discussion that contextualizes how classroom conversations, and their omission, are not conversations only relegated to the classroom, but are part of a larger dialogue within the broader society.

This issue of the Peabody Journal of Education focuses on “Race and Opportunity in the American South” and expands previous scholarly and policy conversations around education and opportunity in th...

The scholarly community has eagerly assessed adults' perspectives on race and opportunity in the “postracial†era. Noticeably absent are studies that probe youths' perceptions of social and educational opportunity within this era, given the relationship between education and upward mobility, and the symbolism embodied in Obama's 2008 election as the first African-American president of the United States.

If we want black males to achieve at academics, we must encourage and support those yearnings as much as we do their athletic aspirations.