Urban Education

In this paper, educational pathways emerge from the nexus of ancient narratives and future possibilities. Such imaginings are as much attributed to African American intellectual traditions as to contemporary Afrofuturisms, including those born in histories of Blackness. The overlay of what was and what is not yet is significant because it engenders educational potentialities that are central to aesthetics and onto-epistemological wondering. The author uses seminal dialogues from scholars like Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune and Anna Julia Cooper as a springboard for envisioning Afrofuturisms in which schooling functions to transgress the assemblages of violence and capital of shame that pervade classrooms and corridors contemporary education. Not unlike the call of Sylvia Wynter, Sun Ra, bell hooks, Octavia Butler and other Afrofuturist activists of the feminine, this paper (re)imagines schooling from the roots of its past and the future conditional they portend.

Social justice leadership has become a popular topic and catchphrase in the field of educational leadership. However, most scholarly and empirical contributions have ignored the inherent tensions, challenges and dilemmas associated with the practice of school leadership and the realities principals confront on a daily basis. This is partly because researchers have tended to ignore multiple facets of justice in their empirical investigations as well as how larger forces outside the school associated with historical, political, social and economic injustices marginalize students and communities. This article explores three cases of challenging school–community contexts that confound and partially subdue the efforts of well-intentioned principals. Each case highlights a dedicated principal committed to their school and community, and documents the significant progress made in addressing particular social justice issues, but also how they confronted justice dilemmas that they believed required them to prioritize certain social justice issues over others. These findings have important implications for how principals view their communities and engage in critical reflection about the leadership decisions and actions they take on a daily basis. This article concludes with implications for future research and a discussion of how aspiring principals can be better prepared to lead for social justice and effectively address justice dilemmas without ignoring or putting off other injustices.

Abstract:  This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class-ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”-based rather than in class-sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.

First this paper will discuss Michel Foucault foundation of his ideas, and why more than a critical intervention from scholars of color is needed. Moreover, we should be aware that not only were Foucault’s deficient of political ideas or a vision of what the world ought to be, but in neglecting question of the human he indirectly made a very ontological statement “only white lives matter”. His ideas are well-known already and I don’t want to site them there or spend a lot of paper space discussing them, what is more important is who and what he represent. Secondly, I want to turn my focus on Marx, to argue that Marxism and Marxist do not and cannot provide us a solution to black suffering. I am not against Marxism, I believe that capitalist exploitation dominates the world and I am against it, but the ontological question “what and who is human?” when answer by the Marxist is always the white, worker, male. So if blacks are outside of human whose racial experiences are not relevant then how can we understanding the student slave, the worker slave, when chattel slavery has already ended? If black people are surplus, therefore disposable, then what is left of Marx? If black people do not have function or purpose within capitalism? I want to follow up with offering an alternative, the work of black feminist Sylvia Wynter is vital to understanding the racialization and the category of human in western modernity (Weheliye, 2014), I will attempt to piece together her call for a new humanism, alongside and relation to work by Afro-Pessimist and Critical Race Theory to gain a perspective of racialization and what does that mean for black students in the Afterlife. In all, I want to argue that the afterlife should be a more proper way of looking at history and progress here in the West. This will cause us to rethink slavery and freedom. Hopefully I will be able to messy picture of schooling where black children are posted to a social death but life is also worth living. To life a life in death or black life is not white social life.

This session highlights The Check-in Check-out mentoring program, which has been found to be effective in decreasing students' disruptive behavior and increasing academic achievement. This research-based intervention provides support for students who are at-risk of dropping out. Results indicated that participants were able to increase accurate completion of the checklist and two out of three participates showed an increase in class grades. All of the participants had significant decreases in school disciplinary actions.

Few problems in education are as pressing as the severe crisis in urban schools. Though educators have tried a wide range of remedies, dismal results persist. This is especially true for low-income youth of color, who drop out of school-and into incarceration-at extremely high rates. The dual calamity of underachievement in schools and violence in many communities across the country is often met with blame and cynicism, and with a host of hurtful and unproductive quick fixes: blaming educators, pitting schools against each other, turning solely to the private sector, and ratcheting up the pressure on teachers and students. But real change will not be possible until we shift our focus from finding fault to developing partnerships, from documenting problems to discovering solutions. Learning to Liberate does just that by presenting true and compelling community-based approaches to school reform. Drawing on over three years of ethnographic research, Vajra Watson explores the complicated process of reaching and teaching today's students. She reveals how four nontraditional educators successfully empower young people who have repeatedly been left behind. Using portraiture, a methodology rooted in vivid storytelling, Watson analyzes each educator's specific teaching tactics. Uncovering four distinct pedagogies-of communication, community, compassion, and commitment-she then pulls together their key strategies to create a theoretically grounded framework that is both useful and effective. A poignant, insightful, and practical analysis, Learning to Liberate is a timely resource for all educators and youth-serving practitioners who are committed to transforming "at-risk" youth into "at-promise" individuals who put their agency and potential into action in their schools and neighborhoods.

ABSTRACT
While studies have examined leadership efforts to improve community
engagement, less is known about how deeply rooted structured discourses,
systems, and practices influence leadership actions and
responses from communities. Deficit approaches to educational policy
reform are pervasive in the most historically marginalized communities
and school districts in the United States (US). Drawing on critical policy
analysis, this study examines a disengaged school district’s leadership
of a Federal School Turnaround Policy from the perspectives of minoritized
communities in an urban US school district. We analyzed deficit
policy discourses, its enactment, and leadership practices using interview
data and archived documents. This study found pathological
discourses and deficit frames of minoritized communities, embedded
in policy enactment, which directly led to leadership practices resulting
in community resistance. In this way, we (re)frame disengaged school
leadership; the resistance and the tension in response to pathological
and deficit structures and ideologies as, at minimum, healthy attempts
of redistributing justice and democracy. In addition, our findings highlight
that discourses and enactment of turnaround school reforms
were intertwined with undemocratic and racialized practices.

The rhetoric about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in urban schools re ects a desire to imagine a new city that is poised to compete in a STEM-centered future. Therefore, STEM has been positioned as a critical part of urban education reform efforts. In various US cities, schools labeled as failing are being repurposed as selective STEM-intensive academies to build a STEM education infrastructure. In Memphis, Tennessee, this process makes visible issues with educational inequity, exacerbated by school choice and gentri cation processes. In this article, I use whiteness as property, a tenet of critical race theory, to examine STEM education in Memphis as a case of urban STEM-based education reform in the United States. I describe claiming STEM education as property as a 2-phase process in which middle-class Whites in urban areas participate to secure STEM education by repurposing failed Black schools and to maintain it by institutionalizing selective admissions strategies.

To ensure the effectiveness of academic advising efforts on campus and to increase Black male collegians’ use of such services, administrators must better understand how Black males experience academic advising in college. This exploratory qualitative case study aims to understand the academic advising experiences of Black males at a large urban, predominantly White institution. Participants in this study (a) experienced a number of process-related challenges, including difficulties with scheduling advising appointments and accessing their academic advisor; (b) stressed the role of race and culture in academic advising; and (c) highlighted positive outcomes of formal and informal advising. Implications for research, practice, and policy are discussed.

According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 45 percent of children in th United States live in low-income
families and 22 percent live in poverty. These children are at the highest risk of academic failure and are the ones in
greatest need of additional support. Studies have shown that the most effective time to invest in a child's education is
during the early years before the child enters kindergarten (Heckman, et al, 2010; Yoshikawa, et. al, 2013). Yet, at the
same time, such at-risk students face challenges outside the classroom (e.g. family economic struggles, neighborhood
violence, lack of role models who have attended college, etc.) that cannot be easily disentangled from their problems in
school and make it difficult to stop the cycle of poverty. So while there are programs that provide early childhood education
interventions and programs that provide workplace assistance to help families get out of poverty, there are few programs
that actually take a two-pronged approach by trying to help children while they help their families as well. Career Advance
in Tulsa, OK is one such program.

This multimethod study draws on theories of teacher care, dispositions, and culturally relevant pedagogy to examine how 12 urban mathematics teachers’ perceptions of their own care practices align with their Black and Latinx students’ (n = 321) sense of connectedness in the  mathematics classroom. A qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with the teachers established three typologies of care: empathetic, transactional, and blended. A questionnaire measure of mathematics classroom connectedness revealed that students in classrooms led by teachers who enacted an empathetic caring pedagogy were more likely to agree that their teachers provided emotional support, their classroom felt like a family, and their contributions were valued in class. Furthermore, students’ sense of classroom connectedness mediated the link between teacher care and the students’ perceived value and relevance of mathematics.

This article aims to share findings from a youth-informed study with interracial anti-racist youth activist groups in two urban high schools. The study used mostly critical ethnographic methods.The findings showed that the agency of youth activists amplified their literacies of love and resistance, organizing, critical teaching, and knowledge. More research is needed in English education related to youth organizing activities across contexts as youth organizing work is largely unknown or underused by educators and schools. Overall, this research supports humanizing collectives that amplify the literacies of youth and position youth-centered education for liberation.

With the exception of the few remaining foreign-controlled lands such as Palestine and Puerto Rico, virtually all public education programs around the world are shaped by decisions taken at the national, state and local levels. The role of global capitalism in shaping urban education is, therefore, perhaps not immediately evident. Indeed, global capitalism alone provides us with a far from complete understanding of urban education in the US today. At best, it describes a set of compelling circumstances to which national, state and local decision-makers must respond. Ultimately, the state of urban education is the product of an ongoing political process in which various stakeholders consult, petition and/or protest before the appropriate public officials. As such, it is largely the case that local decisions and activism continue to shape urban education. At the same time, the forces of global capitalism establish important limitations regarding the options available to those who set urban education policy in the US.

School–community partnerships are currently in the forefront of place-based urban reform efforts. But the literature on these partnerships indicates a variety of models that require different commitments and resources. Through a close review of the literature, we developed a typology of four partnership categories organized from the least to the most comprehensive in purpose and design. This typology reveals different theories of action as well as the conditions that facilitate or obstruct various models of partnership implementation. We argue that such a typology is a useful tool in guiding systemic educational reform, research, and evaluation.

In this volume, the aesthetic contours of literacies and communication are explored through a collection of chapters authored by educators, emerging and established researchers, youth researchers, and teaching artists whose lives intersect with those of young people inside and outside of formal institutional settings. At the heart of the varied research and curricular projects – ranging from writing workshops and photography walks to a theater elective at an alternative to incarceration program – represented in this volume is the pursuit of play, imagination, multimodal expression. The authors share their experiences working with court-involved youth to explore issues related to justice, community, identity, and representation through engagement with multiple media and modes – including photography, theater, writing, painting, and video.

In this essay I examine the racial achievement gap in American education in terms of an impaired psychosocial developmental process. I argue that the well-documented academic underperformance of certain minority groups may stem from the unfavorable resolution of a key developmental crisis in constituent members’ early scholastic experience. I go on to suggest that individual educators can play an important role in eliminating the achievement gap by changing the way they teach in their own classrooms. In part, they may do so by adopting a "transcultural" pedagogy or teaching style, according to which both teachers and their minority students develop (at minimum) transcultural proficiencies and (at maximum) transcultural identities, as a promising way to achieve two important ends. First, the fostering of an academically-industrious self-concept in members of historically underachieving minority groups and hence, second, the closing of the achievement gap "from the bottom up"—one classroom at a time.

This chapter explores a creative writing poem that places community-based poet-mentor educators into low-income middle and high school classrooms to devise curricula that excavates student experiences as a basis for learning. Building upon research on multiple literacies, my findings demonstrate that learning is a social practice that is situated in the lives of students. To unearth young people's capabilities, homegrown experts from the neighborhood shifted the classroom culture and opened the space up for courageous vulnerability and soul-stirring spoken word performance poetry. Throughout this process, young people and the teachers in this study came to use writing as an educational and emancipatory tool for reading the word, the world, and themselves anew. This form of social justice instruction turned nouns, like hope, into verbs for marginalized youth in the inner-city. KEY WORDS social justice instruction, critical literacy, spoken word performance poetry, community school partnerships, urban education, student empowerment

This article offers a critical transdisciplinary heuristic as both a tool for critique of neoliberal reforms in schools, particularly in science and environmental education, and a springboard for the reconstruction of education along more equitable and sustainable lines. Emerging from the sociocultural study of science, critical pedagogy, critical youth studies, and participants’ reflections on practice, this heuristic challenges hegemonic assumptions pervasive in science teaching, learning, and research by foregrounding the lived experiences of students. Two narratives demonstrate the potential of this heuristic in both a formal and an informal context.

The purpose of this study is to understand the intersections
of teachers’ experiences with neoliberal policies, at one high school in the urban south. The research questions include: (1) How is the morale of exceptional urban teachers affected by the contextual factors of a neoliberal school climate? (2) How does their morale relate to teachers’
reports of their pedagogy? This study utilized a qualitative case study design and, in addition to traditional analytic methods used in case studies, drew on grounded theory methodology. Results indicate that: (1) Morale is influenced by a variety of contextual factors at multiple levels, and being in a “good” school or being labeled an “exceptional” educator is not enough to keep one from feeling the effects of disempowerment brought about
by top-down mandates, and (2) Teachers overwhelmingly reported that low morale impacted their view of their own pedagogy, contributing to a “vicious cycle” of low morale, disempowerment, and less effective pedagogy. The focal participants, even though they were hailed as
successful educators, felt discouraged and unable to maintain quality pedagogy because of restrictive educational policies. Thus, I argue that educational policies at the school, district, state, and national level significantly decrease teachers’ morale and have a negative influence
on their perception of their pedagogy. In a vicious cycle, low morale makes them feel like less effective teachers, and their belief that they are less effective lowers their morale.

This article argues that the neoliberal renaissance of the 1980s marketized education, with distinctly negative social consequences. We examine the emergence and promotion of a national-level discourse that positioned schools in the service of the economy. Based on ethnographic research conducted in North Carolina, we then show how local growth elite utilized this discourse to further their own race and class interests to the exclusion and detriment of poorer, African American parents and students. We suggest that ethnographic studies of policy formation help to socially and historically contextualize contemporary debates and denaturalize unwarranted assumptions about the public good.

This chapter describes comprehensive and culturally relevant strategies that school and college counselors in K–12 schools and community settings can use to establish school-familycommunity partnerships that enhance students’ academic preparation, build students’ college aspirations, increase students’ and their families’ college knowledge, and provide students and their families with college planning and financial aid information conducive to successful enrollment in postsecondary institutions. We highlight the critical components of a comprehensive multi-system college readiness partnership program, offer some parent involvement and outreach strategies for collaborating with African-American and Latino families, describe how to locate and leverage resources through community asset mapping, and describe a partnership process model for building school-family-community partnerships focused on college readiness.