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Carrie Sampson

A visionary overview of the political role of publicly elected school boards and a proactive take on the work they can accomplish toward social justice

Harvard Education Press

Race and Education

Navigating School Board Politics: A Framework for Advancing Equity

Laura C. Chávez-Moreno

An investigation into how schooling can enhance and hinder critical-racial consciousness through the making of the Latinx racialized group

How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America

A survey of the ways in which misinformation campaigns damage race relations and educational integrity in US public schools and universities and a blueprint for how to counteract such efforts

The Big Lie About Race in America’s Schools

Nancy E. Dowd

Margaret Beale Spencer

A rallying cry for equitable education informed by a revolutionary re-reading of Brown v. Board of Education, on the 70th anniversary of the ruling

Radical Brown: Keeping the Promise to America's Children

A stirring testament to the realities of Black teaching and learning in the United States and to Black educators' visions for the future

#BlackEducatorsMatter: The Experiences of Black Teachers in an Anti-Black World

Decoteau Irby

An incisive case study of changemaking in action, Stuck Improving analyzes the complex process of racial equity reform within K–12 schools. Scholar Decoteau J. Irby emphasizes that racial equity is dynamic, shifting as our emerging racial consciousness evolves and as racism asserts itself anew. Those who accept the challenge of reform find themselves “stuck improving,” caught in a perpetual dilemma of both making progress and finding ever more progress to be made. Rather than dismissing stuckness as failure, Irby embraces it as an inextricable part of the improvement process.

Irby brings readers into a large suburban high school as school leaders strive to redress racial inequities among the school’s increasingly diverse student population. Over a five-year period, he witnesses both progress and setbacks in the leaders’ attempts to provide an educational environment that is intellectually, socioemotionally, and culturally affirming.

Looking beyond this single school, Irby pinpoints the factors that are essential to the work of equity reform in education. He argues that lasting transformation relies most urgently on the cultivation of organizational conditions that render structural racism impossible to preserve. Irby emphasizes how schools must strengthen and leverage personal, relational, and organizational capacities in order to sustain meaningful change.

Stuck Improving offers a clear-eyed accounting of school-improvement practices, including data-driven instructional approaches, teacher cultural competency, and inquiry-based leadership strategies. This timely work contributes both to the practical efforts of equity-minded school leaders and to a deeper understanding of what the work of racial equity improvement truly entails.

Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership

Terah Venzant Chambers

Racial Opportunity Cost turns critical attention to the specific challenges faced by high-achieving students of color and gives educators a framework for recognizing and addressing these issues. Terah Venzant Chambers roots her discussion in the concept of racial opportunity cost, using a term borrowed from economics to refer to the obstacles faced and tradeoffs made by Black and Latinx students on the path to academic success.

Gathering first-hand accounts from students, practitioners, and researchers, Venzant Chambers underscores a set of experiences common to academically successful students from racially minoritized backgrounds, especially those who attend predominantly white schools. These individual testimonies collectively show how, despite their successes, high-achieving students of color regularly encounter educational racism. As their experiences reveal, their academic progress may also be impeded by secondary stressors such as peer and cultural isolation and struggles with racial identity. These personal accounts illustrate the many ways in which the negative effects of racial opportunity cost extend from K–12 education into postsecondary academics and beyond.

In this clarifying work, Venzant Chambers identifies the factors, such as school culture, intersectionality, and community acceptance that can increase or lessen racial opportunity cost across educational environments. She considers how the individual challenges that high-achieving and high-ability students of color confront reflect larger systemic problems. Venzant Chambers’ framework will help educators proactively cultivate change in their classrooms and schools so that they may lower racial opportunity cost and improve student experiences.

Racial Opportunity Cost: The Toll of Academic Success on Black and Latinx Students

Race and Culturally Responsive Inquiry in Education examines how assumptions about race and culture have shaped US education research and the interpretation and implementation of its results.

This ambitious volume sheds light on the detrimental effects of educational praxis and policies that have characterized communities of color and historically underserved communities as deficient. It reveals how such bias has affected many facets of educational inquiry, from research design and planning to education policy making and evaluation practices. The provocative essays in this work challenge traditional suppositions about whose evidence matters, highlighting approaches for reframing educational inquiry and arguing for the adoption of a culturally responsive stance that can correct inequities by accounting for students’ diverse backgrounds and needs.

Edited by Stafford L. Hood, Henry T. Frierson, Rodney K. Hopson, and Keena N. Arbuthnot and featuring contributions from leading and emerging scholars, the collection is organized around three key areas—education research, educational assessment, and program evaluation. The contributors identify provocative problems that exist at the intersection of race and education in these areas, and they illuminate the many ways in which education reform can address intersectionality. Calling for effective action, they suggest compelling solutions for consideration by policy makers and practitioners as well as researchers.

Together, the essays in this volume make the case that culturally responsive methods that deepen our understanding of educational disparities, appropriately measure what students know and can do, and ensure that we have accurate information about the effectiveness of educational interventions can improve educational outcomes for diverse learners.

Race and Culturally Responsive Inquiry in Education: Improving Research, Evaluation, and Assessment

Nicole M. Joseph

Making Black Girls Count in Math Education explores the experiences of Black girls and women in mathematics from preschool to graduate school, deftly probing race and gender inequity in STEM fields.

Nicole M. Joseph investigates factors that contribute to the glaring underrepresentation of Black female students in the mathematics pipeline. Joseph’s unflinching account calls attention to educational structures and practices that contribute to race- and gender-based stratification in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. The author also disentangles a complex network of historical and sociopolitical elements that influence the perception and experiences of Black girls and women both inside and outside of mathematics education.

In her clear-eyed assessment of the intersectional difficulties facing this marginalized group, Joseph offers a critical view of the existing mathematics education research, practice, and policies that have neglected Black girls and women; confronts the problematic history of mathematics education policy; and considers imbalances in the current teacher workforce in US mathematics programs. She then provides practical, actionable suggestions for reform.

Joseph invites students, families, and educators, as well as researchers, policy makers, and other relevant stakeholders to disrupt systems, structures, and ideologies. She calls for an end to racism and sexism in many areas of mathematics education, including learning environments, curriculum design and implementation, and testing and assessments.

An essential read for anyone concerned about supporting the mathematical learning and development of Black girls and women, this work advocates for coalition-building so that greater, more equitable opportunities for learning and engagement may be offered to Black female students.

Making Black Girls Count in Math Education: A Black Feminist Vision for Transformative Teaching

Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade

Equality or Equity sets forth a compelling argument urging us to shift our understanding of the role of our education system from providing equal opportunity to building an equitable society.

A leading scholar-practitioner and ardent proponent of culturally responsive forms of education, Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade aims to settle the debates over whether we should work toward a public education system built on the goal of equality, in which identical resources are provided for all students, or equity, in which different resources are offered in response to differences in student interests and needs. Duncan-Andrade centers his argument on the importance of creating meaningful education experiences for all students, particularly for low-income students of color and immigrant students, who have gained relatively fewer benefits from decades of equality-focused education reform.

Drawing on research from across a range of disciplines, including neuroscience, social epidemiology, public health, and social work, Duncan-Andrade introduces three essential domains of a pedagogy that are both culturally and community responsive: relationships, relevance, and responsibility. He enlists the voices of practitioners to provide grounded examples of what community-responsive pedagogy looks like in each of these domains. These examples demonstrate how equitable classroom practices can enrich student engagement, enhance trauma responsiveness, and improve educational outcomes.

Equality or Equity makes an urgent appeal for designing and implementing a truly equitable school system and shows us how we can begin to accomplish that goal.

Equality or Equity: Toward a Model of Community-Responsive Education

Leslie T. Fenwick

AACTE 2023 Gloria J. Ladson-Billings Outstanding Book Award​

Jim Crow’s Pink Slip exposes the decades-long repercussions of a too-little-known result of resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education decision: the systematic dismissal of Black educators from public schools.

 In 1954, the Supreme Court’s Brown decision ended segregated schooling in the United States, but regrettably, as documented in congressional testimony and transcripts, it also ended the careers of a generation of highly qualified and credentialed Black teachers and principals. In the Deep South and northern border states over the decades following Brown, Black schools were illegally closed and Black educators were displaced en masse. As educational policy and leadership expert Leslie T. Fenwick deftly demonstrates, the effects of these changes stand contrary to the democratic ideals of an integrated society and equal educational opportunity for all students.

Jim Crow’s Pink Slip provides a trenchant account of how tremendous the loss to the US educational system was and continues to be. Despite efforts of the NAACP and other civil rights organizations, congressional hearings during the Nixon administration, and antiracist activism of the 21st century, the problems fomented after Brown persist. The book draws the line from the past injustices to problems that the educational system grapples with today: not simply the underrepresentation of Black teachers and principals, but also salary reductions, teacher shortages, and systemic inequality.

 By engaging with the complicated legacy of the Brown decision, Fenwick illuminates a crucial chapter in education history. She also offers policy prescriptions aimed at correcting the course of US education, supporting educators, and improving workforce quality and diversity.

Jim Crow's Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership

Camika Royal

Winner of the 2024 AERA Outstanding Book Award

 Not Paved for Us chronicles a fifty-year period in Philadelphia education, and offers a critical look at how school reform efforts do and do not transform outcomes for Black students and educators.

 This illuminating book offers an extensive, expert analysis of a school system that bears the legacy, hallmarks, and consequences that lie at the intersection of race and education. Urban education scholar Camika Royal deftly analyzes decades of efforts aimed at improving school performance within the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), in a brisk survey spanning every SDP superintendency from the 1960s through 2017.

 Royal interrogates the history of education and educational reforms, recounting city, state, and federal interventions. She covers SDP's connections with the Common School Movement and the advent of the Philadelphia Freedom Schools, and she addresses federal policy shifts, from school desegregation to the No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Acts. Her survey provides sociopolitical context and rich groundwork for a nuanced examination of why many large urban districts struggle to implement reforms with fidelity and in ways that advance Black students academically and holistically.

 In a bracing critique, Royal bears witness to the ways in which positive public school reform has been obstructed: through racism and racial capitalism, but also via liberal ideals, neoliberal practices, and austerity tactics. Royal shows how, despite the well-intended actions of larger entities, the weight of school reform, here as in other large urban districts, has been borne by educators striving to meet the extensive needs of their students, families, and communities with only the slightest material, financial, and human resources. She draws on the experiences of Black educators and community members and documents their contributions.

Not Paved for Us highlights the experiences of Black educators as they navigate the racial and cultural politics of urban school reform. Ultimately, Royal names, dissects, and challenges the presence of racism in school reform policies and practices while calling for an antiracist future.

Not Paved for Us: Black Educators and Public School Reform in Philadelphia

Maisha T. Winn

Restorative justice represents “a paradigm shift in the way Americans conceptualize and administer punishment,” says author Maisha T. Winn, from a focus on crime to a focus on harm, including the needs of both those who were harmed and those who caused it. Her book, Justice on Both Sides, provides an urgently needed, comprehensive account of the value of restorative justice and how contemporary schools can implement effective practices to address inequalities associated with race, class, and gender.
 
 Winn, a restorative justice practitioner and scholar, draws on her extensive experience as a coach to school leaders and teachers to show how indispensable restorative justice is in understanding and addressing the educational needs of students, particularly disadvantaged youth. Justice on Both Sides makes a major contribution by demonstrating how this actually works in schools and how it can be integrated into a range of educational settings. It also emphasizes how language and labeling must be addressed in any fruitful restorative effort. Ultimately, Winn makes the case for restorative justice as a crucial answer, at least in part, to the unequal practices and opportunities in American schools.

Justice on Both Sides: Transforming Education Through Restorative Justice

H. Richard Milner

2021 PROSE Award Finalist, Education Practice and Theory Category

 In the thoroughly revised second edition of Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There, H. Richard Milner IV addresses the knowledge and insights required on the part of teachers and school leaders to serve students of color. Milner focuses on a crucial issue in teacher training and professional education: the need to prepare teachers for the racially diverse student populations in their classrooms.

 The book, anchored in real world experiences, centers on case studies that exemplify the challenges, pitfalls, and opportunities facing teachers in diverse classrooms. The case studies—of teachers in urban and suburban settings—are presented amid current discussions about race and teaching. In addition, the second edition includes a new chapter dedicated to opportunity gaps in education and an expanded discussion of how Opportunity Centered Teaching can address these gaps.

Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There strives to help educators in the fight for social justice, equity, inclusion, and transformation for all students. It is a book urgently needed in today’s increasingly diverse classrooms.

Start Where You Are, But Don't Stay There, Second Edition: Understanding Diversity, Opportunity Gaps, and Teaching in Today's Classrooms

2019 Outstanding Book Award, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE)

Millennial Teachers of Color explores the opportunities and challenges for creating and sustaining a healthy teaching force in the United States. Millennials are the largest generational cohort in American history, with approximately ninety million members and, of these, roughly 43 percent are people of color. This book, edited by prominent teacher educator Mary E. Dilworth, considers the unique qualities, challenges, and opportunities posed by that large population for the teaching field.
 
Noting that a diverse teaching and learning community enhances student achievement, particularly for the underserved and underachieving preK–12 student population, Dilworth argues that efforts to recruit, groom, and retain teachers of color are out-of-date and inadequate. She and the contributors offer fresh looks at these millennials and explore their views of the teaching profession; focus attention on their relation to schools and teaching; and consider how these young teachers feel about teaching for social justice.
 
The book is intended to disrupt the current line of inquiry that suggests that by simply increasing the number of teachers of color equity has been established. Readers will gain insights on this unique and valuable group of prospective and practicing preK–12 educators and understanding of the need for more contemporary approaches to recruitment, preparation, hiring, and placement.

Contributors
 
Keffrelyn D. Brown
Keith C. Catone
Genesis A. Chavez
Marcus J. Coleman
Hollee R. Freeman
Michael Hansen
Socorro G. Herrera
Sarah Ishmael
Sabrina Hope King
Adam T. Kuranishi 
Lindsay A. Miller
Amanda R. Morales
Janice Hamilton Outtz
Zollie Stevenson Jr.
Dulari Tahbildar
Angela M. Ward

Millennial Teachers of Color

Carolyn R. Hodges

Olga M. Welch

Truth Without Tears is a timely and insightful portrait of Black women leaders in American colleges and universities. Carolyn R. Hodges and Olga M. Welch are former deans who draw extensively on their experience as African American women to account for both the challenges and opportunities facing women of color in educational leadership positions.
 
Hodges and Welch deftly combine autobiography with more general information and observations to fashion an interesting and helpful book about higher education leadership. They offer their perspectives on being the first deans of color in two predominately white institutions in an effort to fill a gap that exists in the literature on deanships in higher education.
 
Each chapter offers reflections or examples of the authors’ particular experiences that have taught them how to become effective leaders. The book engages readers to consider ways of learning how to balance the need for action with “deliberative and deliberate approaches” that are grounded in maintaining decisiveness, accountability, and allegiance to organizational goals, especially those that support inclusiveness and diversity of perspective.
 
A nuanced and complex depiction of successful leadership, Truth Without Tears is a valuable resource for current and aspiring higher education leaders.

Truth Without Tears: African American Women Deans Share Lessons in Leadership

Chezare A. Warren

2018 Critics' Choice Book Award, American Educational Studies Association (AESA)
2018 Outstanding Book Award, Society of Professors of Education

Chezare A. Warren chronicles the transition of a cohort of young Black males from Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men to their early experiences in higher education. A rich and closely observed account of a mission-driven school and its students, Urban Preparation makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how young males of color can best be served in schools throughout the United States today.
 
A founding teacher at Urban Prep, Warren offers a detailed exploration of what this single-sex public high school on the South Side of Chicago has managed to accomplish amid profoundly challenging circumstances. He provides a comprehensive portrait of the school—its leaders, teachers, and professional staff; its students; and the community that the school aims to serve—and highlights how preparation for higher education is central to its mission.
 
Warren focuses on three main goals: to describe Urban Prep’s plans and efforts to prepare young Black males for college; to understand how race, community, poverty, and the school contributed, in complex and interrelated ways, to the academic goals of these students; and to offer a wide-ranging set of conclusions about the school environments and conditions that might help young Black males throughout the country succeed in high school and college.

Urban Preparation: Young Black Men Moving from Chicago's South Side to Success in Higher Education

Bryan A. Brown

2021 Outstanding Book Award, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE)

Science in the City examines how language and culture matter for effective science teaching. Author Bryan A. Brown argues that, given the realities of our multilingual and multicultural society, teachers must truly understand how issues of culture intersect with the fundamental principles of learning. This book links an exploration of contemporary research on urban science teaching to a more generative instructional approach in which students develop mastery by discussing science in culturally meaningful ways.

The book starts with a trenchant analysis of the “black tax,” a double standard at work in science language and classrooms that forces students of color to appropriate and express their science knowledge solely in ways that accord with the dominant culture and knowledge regime. Because we are in an interactive, multimedia world, the author also posits the necessity of applying what is known about best practices in science teaching to best practices in technology.

The book then turns to instruction, illustrating how science education can flourish if it is connected to students’ backgrounds, identities, language, and culture. In this empowered—and inclusive—form of science classroom, the role of narrative is key: educators use stories and anecdotes to induct students into the realm of scientific thinking; introduce big ideas in easy, familiar terms; and prioritize explanation over mastery of symbolic systems. The result is a classroom that showcases how the use of more familiar, culturally relevant modes of communication can pave the way for improved science learning.

Science in the City: Culturally Relevant STEM Education

Muhammad Khalifa

Culturally Responsive School Leadership focuses on how school leaders can effectively serve minoritized students—those who have been historically marginalized in school and society. The book demonstrates how leaders can engage students, parents, teachers, and communities in ways that positively impact learning by honoring indigenous heritages and local cultural practices.
 
 Muhammad Khalifa explores three basic premises. First, that a full-fledged and nuanced understanding of “cultural responsiveness” is essential to successful school leadership. Second, that cultural responsiveness will not flourish and succeed in schools without sustained efforts by school leaders to define and promote it. Finally, that culturally responsive school leadership comprises a number of crucial leadership behaviors, which include critical self-reflection; the development of culturally responsive teachers; the promotion of inclusive, anti-oppressive school environments; and engagement with students’ indigenous community contexts.
 
 Based on an ethnography of a school principal who exemplifies the practices and behaviors of culturally responsive school leadership, the book provides educators with pedagogy and strategies for immediate implementation.

Race and Education - The book series

Race and Education - The book series

Race and Education books in order

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