Leah Faw’s scholarship explores issues of educational policy at the intersections of schools and cities, families, labor, and culture. Her dissertation explored homeschooling through the lens of mothers’ labor and their roles as educators; Faw has previously published on district hopping, feminist educational history, and the representation of schooling in popular culture. Faw is the co-chief emerita of the Berkeley Review of Education (BRE) and has worked as a researcher on the Central Valley School Discipline Learning Project, a statewide qualitative study that examined school discipline, climate, and culture across California. Faw received her PhD from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education. Address: 2121 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704
Continuous Improvement: A Leadership Process for School Improvement, 2023
This chapter in an edited book focuses on the work of two improvement network hubs in California ... more This chapter in an edited book focuses on the work of two improvement network hubs in California as they tried to support participating districts and schools to improve the proportion of students “on-track” for post-secondary success. California has a particular stake in figuring out how to support districts in consistently using continuous improvement (CI) to achieve measurable gains in student outcomes because state policy (e.g., Local Control Funding Formula, California’s Every Student Succeeds Act Plan) prescribes CI as the approach to improvement in its accountability system. This chapter focuses on lessons learned from two hubs—organizations at the center of improvement networks that convene members and create conditions under which the organizations can learn from both the hub and one another. Through analyzing how these hubs worked with partner districts and schools during the 2021–2022 school year, we sought to answer the question: What hub actions support sites to construct fit, potentially positioning them to scale the work and ultimately have a sustained impact on student outcomes?
Chapter: "Students Without a Cause: Blackboard Jungle, High School Movies, and High School Life."... more Chapter: "Students Without a Cause: Blackboard Jungle, High School Movies, and High School Life." In 1955, Blackboard Jungle captured the race, class, and gender tensions that suffuse adult and youth fascination with high school and created the template that high school movies continue to follow. Unlike Blackboard Jungle’s students, most American teenagers were not delinquents, but images of delinquency provided a model for how to navigate American schooling, youth culture, and society. The film particularly illustrates the conflict between getting ahead and getting along in high school, mirroring the tension between democratic and capitalist ideologies central to American life. By combining an examination of Blackboard Jungle's ambivalent narrative with an analysis of its reception, and its echoes in a youth culture in which high school occupies a central place, this chapter explores the terms under which youth and adults contest the social space and culture of the high school.
Busy educators are often faced with a dilemma—staying up to date with evidence-based practices an... more Busy educators are often faced with a dilemma—staying up to date with evidence-based practices and initiatives that support their professional growth while combating a constant barrage of superficial ideas from other contexts. Continuous improvement approaches to change offer methods for testing new ideas and adapting them to local contexts. If seen as add-ons to educators’ roles, however, these approaches are unlikely to yield deep engagement and sustained improvement. This practice brief explains the CORE Districts’ five-driver model, a modified approach that deepened educators’ ownership of the work and positioned schools to sustain improvement over time.
California’s ambitious investment in Universal Transitional Kindergarten (UTK) reflects a commitm... more California’s ambitious investment in Universal Transitional Kindergarten (UTK) reflects a commitment to providing access to UTK for all 4-year-olds in public schools by the 2025–26 academic year. However, the implementation of transitional kindergarten (TK) presents challenges for districts in aligning this new grade coherently with existing grade levels and prekindergarten (PK) options within the context of the mixed-delivery model. This model adds complexity to achieving coherence as students transition from PK or TK to the existing district system. This report from PACE identifies four promising practices observed during the 2022–23 school year to support access and coherence in early childhood education
In recent years, districts have paid special attention to the common practice of “district hoppin... more In recent years, districts have paid special attention to the common practice of “district hopping,” families bending geographic school assignment rules by sending a child to a school in a district where the child does not formally reside—usually to a district that is more desirable because of higher performing schools or greater educational resources. In several high-profile cases, mothers who engaged in district hopping were charged with “grand theft” of educational services. By situating these cases in the broader context of market-based reforms, we refocus attention on the responses of districts rather than the actions of parents. We argue that increased privatization of education and growing dominance of a “private-goods” model of schooling create the conditions necessary for framing these actions as “theft.”
This work examines contemporary conservative Christian grassroots movements in several distinct w... more This work examines contemporary conservative Christian grassroots movements in several distinct ways. The first is an in-depth historical and theoretical analysis of conservatism, grassroots mobilization, political participation, and religious political activism. This study begins with the New Deal and the post-World War II eras, and expands into a discussion of American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Special attention is paid to the early conservative intellectual tradition of the 1950s and 1960s and focuses on the ideological compromises contained within the concept of “fusionism,” an idea which blended traditions of libertarianism and social conservatism. This work goes on to examine specific conservative grassroots campaigns. I use both theoretical material regarding collective action and case studies of the anti-ERA and 1964 Barry Goldwater for President campaign. The emergence of the Christian Right is examined from a political, demographical, and doctrinal standpoint. This examination transitions from the national picture to the inner workings of a local conservative Christian grassroots campaign. To that end, this work includes a two- part case study of Oregon’s 2004 Measure 36, which successfully sought to amend the state constitution to restrict legal marriage to one man and one woman. The first part of this study consists of a timeline and general overview of the campaign, created through news articles and interviews with a sampling of the many individuals who organized and participated in the Measure 36 campaign. The second aspect of this case study is a survey, distributed to 500 donors to the Defense of Marriage Coalition, the group that proposed and organized the measure. I constructed the study with individual questions taken from independent polling institutions. My study finds that framing and decentralization are crucial to the success of grassroots campaigns of this nature.
PopularCulture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA), 2018
Using quintessential Hollywood depictions of teenage angst like Carrie (1976), Heathers (1988), P... more Using quintessential Hollywood depictions of teenage angst like Carrie (1976), Heathers (1988), Pump Up the Volume (1990), Mean Girls (2004) and adding to these edgier and more realistic depictions of teen anomie like River’s Edge (1986), Elephant (2003), and Brick (2005) this paper examines the central theme of alienation in the context of American schooling.
CriticalRace Studies in Education Association (CRSEA), 2019
This work considers schools as just one of the many institutions by which the American state disp... more This work considers schools as just one of the many institutions by which the American state dispenses protection and punishment in the performance of its parental role. In 2018, migrant children at the US-Mexico border are being forcibly removed from their parents and treated as unaccompanied minors, a status that deems migrant parents inherently criminal and allows the state to assert parens patria. This policy signals the global reach of American neoliberalism, as well as a move away from older forms of paternalism in service of regulated subjectivity. Whereas other and earlier forms of parens patria serve(d) to discipline American citizens, this policy performs preemptive disenfranchisement, aiming instead to leverage state-level parental abuse to deter further state engagement.
This paper problematizes the liberatory promises of female representation in sport. By comparing ... more This paper problematizes the liberatory promises of female representation in sport. By comparing several female sports films, we find that while there may be some room for women in athletics, such space also acts to police a prescription of femininity that is inherently heterosexual and White. Compulsory heteronormative relationships shield women from the bastion of masculinity imbedded in sport participation that threatens to engulf femininity. Thus, popular culture depictions of women’s sports reinforce post-feminist narratives, appropriating “bits and pieces” of feminist rhetoric in such a way that “blurs gender difference but does not undermine patriarchy” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 845).
High School is popularly constructed as a place of learning and while that may hold true, much of... more High School is popularly constructed as a place of learning and while that may hold true, much of what is learned falls well outside academic subjects like Math and English. From the earliest instructions directed to “boys and girls,” educational environments are suffused with the hidden curriculum of gender. By High School, both the academic and social spheres of the institution are filled with requirements that students perform gendered roles, play act at adult relationships, and sort themselves into categories predicated on gender.
Using the 1995 film Clueless, a modernization of Austen’s Emma, as our case study, this paper examines how heteronormative behaviors are mandatory for students and how both adherence and non-adherence to these norms can be lonely, dangerous, de-humanizing, and potentially destructive to students and their intellectual development. Focusing our study on a widely popular film like Clueless allows us to see how the lessons of gendered expectations are expressed both within schools and to audiences of school-aged viewers. Our analysis further considers how heteronormative gender roles and behaviors are both part of the intrinsic fabric of High School and constitute one of the major sorting functions of the institution. Contrasting popular portrayals of this gender work in media like Clueless with literature from the fields of critical theory, educational sociology, and sex education, this paper finds that compulsory heteronormativity, while occasionally contested, is one of the major, enduring, and pervasive organizing forces of the High School institution.
Blackboard Jungle provided the template for high school movies that continue to follo... more Blackboard Jungle provided the template for high school movies that continue to follow. It captured race, class, and gender tensions that suffuse adult and youth fascination with high school delinquency. Unlike the young men portrayed in Blackboard Jungle, most American teenagers were not and are not delinquent, but the image of delinquency helped even those high school students to navigate the social demands and ideology which have shaped American schooling, youth culture, and society. By combining an examination of the movie’s ambivalent narrative with an analysis of its reception, and its echoes in a youth culture in which high school occupied a central place, this paper explores the terms under which youth and adults contested the social space and culture of the high school. In particular, the paper argues that the anxieties about teen misconduct portrayed in Blackboard Jungle have enduring power because the conflicts between getting ahead and getting along in high school mirror the tension between democratic/egalitarian and capitalist ideologies central to American life.
Continuous Improvement: A Leadership Process for School Improvement, 2023
This chapter in an edited book focuses on the work of two improvement network hubs in California ... more This chapter in an edited book focuses on the work of two improvement network hubs in California as they tried to support participating districts and schools to improve the proportion of students “on-track” for post-secondary success. California has a particular stake in figuring out how to support districts in consistently using continuous improvement (CI) to achieve measurable gains in student outcomes because state policy (e.g., Local Control Funding Formula, California’s Every Student Succeeds Act Plan) prescribes CI as the approach to improvement in its accountability system. This chapter focuses on lessons learned from two hubs—organizations at the center of improvement networks that convene members and create conditions under which the organizations can learn from both the hub and one another. Through analyzing how these hubs worked with partner districts and schools during the 2021–2022 school year, we sought to answer the question: What hub actions support sites to construct fit, potentially positioning them to scale the work and ultimately have a sustained impact on student outcomes?
Chapter: "Students Without a Cause: Blackboard Jungle, High School Movies, and High School Life."... more Chapter: "Students Without a Cause: Blackboard Jungle, High School Movies, and High School Life." In 1955, Blackboard Jungle captured the race, class, and gender tensions that suffuse adult and youth fascination with high school and created the template that high school movies continue to follow. Unlike Blackboard Jungle’s students, most American teenagers were not delinquents, but images of delinquency provided a model for how to navigate American schooling, youth culture, and society. The film particularly illustrates the conflict between getting ahead and getting along in high school, mirroring the tension between democratic and capitalist ideologies central to American life. By combining an examination of Blackboard Jungle's ambivalent narrative with an analysis of its reception, and its echoes in a youth culture in which high school occupies a central place, this chapter explores the terms under which youth and adults contest the social space and culture of the high school.
Busy educators are often faced with a dilemma—staying up to date with evidence-based practices an... more Busy educators are often faced with a dilemma—staying up to date with evidence-based practices and initiatives that support their professional growth while combating a constant barrage of superficial ideas from other contexts. Continuous improvement approaches to change offer methods for testing new ideas and adapting them to local contexts. If seen as add-ons to educators’ roles, however, these approaches are unlikely to yield deep engagement and sustained improvement. This practice brief explains the CORE Districts’ five-driver model, a modified approach that deepened educators’ ownership of the work and positioned schools to sustain improvement over time.
California’s ambitious investment in Universal Transitional Kindergarten (UTK) reflects a commitm... more California’s ambitious investment in Universal Transitional Kindergarten (UTK) reflects a commitment to providing access to UTK for all 4-year-olds in public schools by the 2025–26 academic year. However, the implementation of transitional kindergarten (TK) presents challenges for districts in aligning this new grade coherently with existing grade levels and prekindergarten (PK) options within the context of the mixed-delivery model. This model adds complexity to achieving coherence as students transition from PK or TK to the existing district system. This report from PACE identifies four promising practices observed during the 2022–23 school year to support access and coherence in early childhood education
In recent years, districts have paid special attention to the common practice of “district hoppin... more In recent years, districts have paid special attention to the common practice of “district hopping,” families bending geographic school assignment rules by sending a child to a school in a district where the child does not formally reside—usually to a district that is more desirable because of higher performing schools or greater educational resources. In several high-profile cases, mothers who engaged in district hopping were charged with “grand theft” of educational services. By situating these cases in the broader context of market-based reforms, we refocus attention on the responses of districts rather than the actions of parents. We argue that increased privatization of education and growing dominance of a “private-goods” model of schooling create the conditions necessary for framing these actions as “theft.”
This work examines contemporary conservative Christian grassroots movements in several distinct w... more This work examines contemporary conservative Christian grassroots movements in several distinct ways. The first is an in-depth historical and theoretical analysis of conservatism, grassroots mobilization, political participation, and religious political activism. This study begins with the New Deal and the post-World War II eras, and expands into a discussion of American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Special attention is paid to the early conservative intellectual tradition of the 1950s and 1960s and focuses on the ideological compromises contained within the concept of “fusionism,” an idea which blended traditions of libertarianism and social conservatism. This work goes on to examine specific conservative grassroots campaigns. I use both theoretical material regarding collective action and case studies of the anti-ERA and 1964 Barry Goldwater for President campaign. The emergence of the Christian Right is examined from a political, demographical, and doctrinal standpoint. This examination transitions from the national picture to the inner workings of a local conservative Christian grassroots campaign. To that end, this work includes a two- part case study of Oregon’s 2004 Measure 36, which successfully sought to amend the state constitution to restrict legal marriage to one man and one woman. The first part of this study consists of a timeline and general overview of the campaign, created through news articles and interviews with a sampling of the many individuals who organized and participated in the Measure 36 campaign. The second aspect of this case study is a survey, distributed to 500 donors to the Defense of Marriage Coalition, the group that proposed and organized the measure. I constructed the study with individual questions taken from independent polling institutions. My study finds that framing and decentralization are crucial to the success of grassroots campaigns of this nature.
PopularCulture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA), 2018
Using quintessential Hollywood depictions of teenage angst like Carrie (1976), Heathers (1988), P... more Using quintessential Hollywood depictions of teenage angst like Carrie (1976), Heathers (1988), Pump Up the Volume (1990), Mean Girls (2004) and adding to these edgier and more realistic depictions of teen anomie like River’s Edge (1986), Elephant (2003), and Brick (2005) this paper examines the central theme of alienation in the context of American schooling.
CriticalRace Studies in Education Association (CRSEA), 2019
This work considers schools as just one of the many institutions by which the American state disp... more This work considers schools as just one of the many institutions by which the American state dispenses protection and punishment in the performance of its parental role. In 2018, migrant children at the US-Mexico border are being forcibly removed from their parents and treated as unaccompanied minors, a status that deems migrant parents inherently criminal and allows the state to assert parens patria. This policy signals the global reach of American neoliberalism, as well as a move away from older forms of paternalism in service of regulated subjectivity. Whereas other and earlier forms of parens patria serve(d) to discipline American citizens, this policy performs preemptive disenfranchisement, aiming instead to leverage state-level parental abuse to deter further state engagement.
This paper problematizes the liberatory promises of female representation in sport. By comparing ... more This paper problematizes the liberatory promises of female representation in sport. By comparing several female sports films, we find that while there may be some room for women in athletics, such space also acts to police a prescription of femininity that is inherently heterosexual and White. Compulsory heteronormative relationships shield women from the bastion of masculinity imbedded in sport participation that threatens to engulf femininity. Thus, popular culture depictions of women’s sports reinforce post-feminist narratives, appropriating “bits and pieces” of feminist rhetoric in such a way that “blurs gender difference but does not undermine patriarchy” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 845).
High School is popularly constructed as a place of learning and while that may hold true, much of... more High School is popularly constructed as a place of learning and while that may hold true, much of what is learned falls well outside academic subjects like Math and English. From the earliest instructions directed to “boys and girls,” educational environments are suffused with the hidden curriculum of gender. By High School, both the academic and social spheres of the institution are filled with requirements that students perform gendered roles, play act at adult relationships, and sort themselves into categories predicated on gender.
Using the 1995 film Clueless, a modernization of Austen’s Emma, as our case study, this paper examines how heteronormative behaviors are mandatory for students and how both adherence and non-adherence to these norms can be lonely, dangerous, de-humanizing, and potentially destructive to students and their intellectual development. Focusing our study on a widely popular film like Clueless allows us to see how the lessons of gendered expectations are expressed both within schools and to audiences of school-aged viewers. Our analysis further considers how heteronormative gender roles and behaviors are both part of the intrinsic fabric of High School and constitute one of the major sorting functions of the institution. Contrasting popular portrayals of this gender work in media like Clueless with literature from the fields of critical theory, educational sociology, and sex education, this paper finds that compulsory heteronormativity, while occasionally contested, is one of the major, enduring, and pervasive organizing forces of the High School institution.
Blackboard Jungle provided the template for high school movies that continue to follo... more Blackboard Jungle provided the template for high school movies that continue to follow. It captured race, class, and gender tensions that suffuse adult and youth fascination with high school delinquency. Unlike the young men portrayed in Blackboard Jungle, most American teenagers were not and are not delinquent, but the image of delinquency helped even those high school students to navigate the social demands and ideology which have shaped American schooling, youth culture, and society. By combining an examination of the movie’s ambivalent narrative with an analysis of its reception, and its echoes in a youth culture in which high school occupied a central place, this paper explores the terms under which youth and adults contested the social space and culture of the high school. In particular, the paper argues that the anxieties about teen misconduct portrayed in Blackboard Jungle have enduring power because the conflicts between getting ahead and getting along in high school mirror the tension between democratic/egalitarian and capitalist ideologies central to American life.
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Books by Leah Faw
http://www.amazon.com/American-Education-Popular-Media-Blackboard/dp/1137430729/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1435621733&sr=8-1&keywords=from+the+blackboard+to+the+silver+screen
Papers by Leah Faw
Conference Presentations by Leah Faw
Thus, popular culture depictions of women’s sports reinforce post-feminist narratives, appropriating “bits and pieces” of feminist rhetoric in such a way that “blurs gender difference but does not undermine patriarchy” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 845).
Using the 1995 film Clueless, a modernization of Austen’s Emma, as our case study, this paper examines how heteronormative behaviors are mandatory for students and how both adherence and non-adherence to these norms can be lonely, dangerous, de-humanizing, and potentially destructive to students and their intellectual development. Focusing our study on a widely popular film like Clueless allows us to see how the lessons of gendered expectations are expressed both within schools and to audiences of school-aged viewers. Our analysis further considers how heteronormative gender roles and behaviors are both part of the intrinsic fabric of High School and constitute one of the major sorting functions of the institution. Contrasting popular portrayals of this gender work in media like Clueless with literature from the fields of critical theory, educational sociology, and sex education, this paper finds that compulsory heteronormativity, while occasionally contested, is one of the major, enduring, and pervasive organizing forces of the High School institution.
Talks by Leah Faw
http://www.amazon.com/American-Education-Popular-Media-Blackboard/dp/1137430729/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1435621733&sr=8-1&keywords=from+the+blackboard+to+the+silver+screen
Thus, popular culture depictions of women’s sports reinforce post-feminist narratives, appropriating “bits and pieces” of feminist rhetoric in such a way that “blurs gender difference but does not undermine patriarchy” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 845).
Using the 1995 film Clueless, a modernization of Austen’s Emma, as our case study, this paper examines how heteronormative behaviors are mandatory for students and how both adherence and non-adherence to these norms can be lonely, dangerous, de-humanizing, and potentially destructive to students and their intellectual development. Focusing our study on a widely popular film like Clueless allows us to see how the lessons of gendered expectations are expressed both within schools and to audiences of school-aged viewers. Our analysis further considers how heteronormative gender roles and behaviors are both part of the intrinsic fabric of High School and constitute one of the major sorting functions of the institution. Contrasting popular portrayals of this gender work in media like Clueless with literature from the fields of critical theory, educational sociology, and sex education, this paper finds that compulsory heteronormativity, while occasionally contested, is one of the major, enduring, and pervasive organizing forces of the High School institution.