This research examines Black educators' professional experiences in the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) over forty years, through six superintendents and a state takeover. Using critical race theory, this research uncovers how Black educators' perceptions of SDP, based on district leadership, combined with their interpretations of the historical, social, and political contexts, influenced how they defined their professional situations, interpreted the culture of the District, and how they performed their roles. A phenomenological, historical ethnography approach is employed to investigate person to institution interactions interpreted through the historical record and educators' narratives. This research explores power relations and disjuncture between the goals, assumptions, and rhetoric of the School District of Philadelphia as expressed through its policies, politics, and practices, juxtaposed against the narratives of Black educators. This research found that SDP is peculiar, particular, unforgiving, and deeply politically entrenched. Its politics are complicated by issues of race and insider-outsider tensions and are compounded by state politics and the national political landscape. The politics within SDP were also influenced by the interpretation of the contemporary political narrative by the superintendent and his or her epistemological beliefs and ontological bent within that narrative. / Urban Education

This study described and analyzed the development and implementation of an advisory program at one urban middle school. Development of the advisory program began during the 1997-98 school year. The implementation of the program was examined during the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 school years. This school site was chosen because of the in-depth research and planning of the program beyond the typical amount performed by many schools, and the wide-scale staff participation utilized in the program's development. In order to follow the processes of development and implementation, several models of change, innovation, and organizational analysis were used to provide focus for analysis of events that occurred during the three years of the program examined in this study. Data was collected in multiple manners. A complete review of school documents concerning the advisory program was performed, and over 50 percent of the faculty were interviewed through individual and team interviews. The findings of this study include various elements concerning the development and implementation of the advisory program. Data was collected and analyzed in three main categories including a) driving and resisting factors for beginning and implementing the program, b) processes used to plan, maintain and develop the program, and c) the periods in which the program became stable. Additional considerations were examined including the evaluation of the program, future possibilities for implementation, and staff roles in the program. Recommendations of the study include: limiting the focus of the advisory program; maintaining consistent goals; starting with a limited program; securing high staff participation; providing extensive time for planning; maintaining a high level of monitoring by administration and staff leaders; providing in-depth training; and, insuring that open lines of communication exist.

The role of school culture in facilitating underrepresented students' access to and success in college is examined in this ethnographic study. The purpose of this study is to examine an urban, public high school's culture in the southeast region of the United States with a high population of African Americans and students living in poverty. The college-­ going culture theory proposed by McClafferty, McDonough and Nunez (2002) and later refined by McDonough (2006) is used as a framework for this study and an ethnographic research design is employed using interviews, observations, open-­ended surveys, and document review as data collection methods. The objective of the study is to describe the culture of an urban high school by examining its artifacts, values and beliefs and underlying assumptions, specifically as it relates to preparation of students for postsecondary education. Findings from this study will help inform strategies on reforming school culture to support college access and success for urban high school students, and will support the use of the college-­going culture theory as a useful lens through which to understand college access issues. Additionally, this study helps to describe some of the common characteristics of urban education in the heart of education reform and describes the core challenges associated with developing college-­going culture in urban communities with high poverty and low college attendance rates.

In response to stalled struggles for equal and integrated education by African American students, parents, teachers, and activists, Harlem in the late 1960s saw a number of independent schools emerge that drew inspiration and rhetoric from Black Power ideas. This dissertation investigated the reasons for these schools’ emergence in Harlem; what goals these institutions pursued; how they translated their goals, purposes, and ideas into pedagogical practices and curricula; and how these were adapted to the specific challenges faced by the schools by closely examining three such initiatives: West Harlem Liberation School; the storefront academies run by the New York Urban League; and West Side Street Academy, later renamed Academy for Black and Latin Education (ABLE). All of these schools incorporated values and ideas that were central to the philosophy of Black Power, such as an emphasis on self-determination, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, Black history, and cultural pride. However, the ways in which these core ideas of Black Power were interpreted and put into practice varied significantly between different initiatives, especially as they had to navigate daily necessities such as applying for funding or making compromises with corporate donors, foundations, or the New York City Board of Education. Thus, while some of these educational institutions explicitly pursued activist agendas—by positioning themselves as a means to pressure the public school system into fundamental change or by conceptualizing education explicitly as a tool for collectively dismantling systems of oppression—others came to favor approaches designed to uplift individual students rather than pursue more radical social change. While scholars have extensively studied the fights for desegregation and community control of public schools in Harlem and New York City, the establishment of these Black alternative educational initiatives outside of the public school system as an extension of the movement for quality and equitable education—and as a part of social justice movements, including the Black Power Movement, more broadly—has rarely been considered. These schools and their approaches also provide a unique lens through which to study and re-evaluate Black Power ideas: They reflect the diversity and contradictions of the movement, the different goals and avenues for change that activists within that movement envisioned, and how the theories and ideas of Black Power were translated into practice on the local level in specific issues.

The purpose of this sequential explanatory mixed method study was to determine novice teachers’ perception of factor(s) that influenced their intent to remain in the teaching profession in a large suburban/urban school district located in the Southeast Region of the United States. The research examined the relationship between the independent variables—(a) perceived effectiveness of induction program, (b) quality of mentor-ship, (c) perceived effectiveness of professional development, (d) teacher Preparation, (e) job satisfaction, (f) administrative support, and (g) teacher self-efficacy—and the dependent variable: teacher retention. The novice teacher surveys included 31 items based on a 7-point response Likert scale, followed by individual interviews with nine open-ended questions. The researcher analyzed a total of 48 surveys and seven interviews from 16 identified schools located in the school district. Both data sources collected from the mixed method study revealed that the novice teachers viewed administrative support, job satisfaction, and teacher self-efficacy as the variables with the most significant influence on their intent to remain in the teaching profession. These factors proved beneficial to the school district and schools as a tool to guide the efforts of increasing teacher retention and developing new teachers. Additionally, the novice teachers’ perception also highlighted the need for more structured support for the district and school’s induction program, mentoring program, professional development and teacher preparation for increasing teacher retention. The implications of this study were to identify what influenced novice teachers to remain in the teaching profession in the identified school district. As a result, the district could decrease teacher retention rate and thus curtail the cost of continually hiring and training new teachers.

Enactment of social justice education is an important step toward rectifying pervasive discrimination woven into public schools and other American institutions. A social justice educator must develop diverse cultural competencies and also recognize oneself as a racialized participant in a system of racial inequity. The demographics of an overwhelmingly White teaching force and increasingly diverse student body creates both need and opportunity to understand the development of White multicultural educators. This is a case study of two White, female, middle-class first-year urban teachers who had completed a social justice-oriented preparation program. Written reflections, interviews, and focus groups captured teachers’ perspectives on their first-year intercultural, urban teaching experiences. Findings illuminated experiences with cultural disequilibrium, culturally relevant teaching, critical consciousness, learning to teach, relationships, and navigating institutional knowledge. Teachers negotiated cultural disequilibrium by both seeking new cultural knowledge, and seeking or creating experiences more consistent with schooling they experienced as students. Culturally relevant teaching emerged through teachers’ critiques of academic policy and practices that disadvantaged their students, yet were coupled with constraints that inhibited cultural synchronization in classrooms. Student achievement was considered a primary responsibility, but teachers were frustrated by accountability to fill perceived large academic gaps. Teachers simultaneously participated in and critiqued the dominant structures, stereotypes, and narratives in place in their schools Teachers viewed themselves as life-long learners and valued foundational preservice experiences and school-based relationships to build knowledge of teaching. Teachers understood the value of relationships with families and students yet felt constrained in developing those relationships to enhance culturally relevant teaching practices. Teaching in a culture of high stakes accountability and monitoring stifled innovative teaching. Implications for teacher supports during induction include preparing teachers to enter the induction process with an experience bank and foundational critical consciousness from which they can build in new contexts, providing opportunities for teachers to build community- and school-based knowledge and relationships as early as possible, and providing supportive mentoring that guides teachers’ critical consciousness in their new school contexts.

Urban schools exist within everyday parlance as an ongoing quandary within American public schools. However, historical, social, cultural, and discursive meanings intersect and compose urban school contexts (re)producing what is known and understandable. Early–career teachers work within these intersections. How they work within and think about these intersections influence their teaching and classroom pedagogical practices. In other words, urban school discourses influence and impact curriculum, which is navigated and mediated by early–career teachers. Through Critical Race Theory and poststructural lenses, this research interrogates normative assumptions and interpretations undergirding these historical (re)productions which often constitute the families and students within these school communities. I conducted this study through individual interviews and a focus group session with six teachers who graduated from a graduate–level, university–based Urban Teacher Residency teacher preparation program and who have worked completed between three to six years as teachers in urban school settings. By focusing on the lived experiences of these early–career teachers, this study contributes to teacher education programs and to in–service induction teaching. These early–career teachers navigate district– and school–level discourses, both professionally in how they conduct their classrooms and personally in how they process their emotional lives. They continuously seek ways in which to maintain their vision for social justice and equity within urban school settings and to maintain an ethic of care for their students. Therefore, the analysis includes my reading and interpretation of teacher and student discourses within these conversations. Throughout these interpretations, I write through, integrate, and interrogate my own experiences and positionalities as an African–American woman, former student, and educator in urban school contexts. Finally, I construct a counter–story in which the teachers grapple with and support an ethic of care for their students. Counter–stories center the voices and experiences of teachers of color as they attend to systemic school inequalities. This research provides a platform for examining and revising the oft–repeated stories of urban schools so that they might become vehicles for transforming structural and cultural norms that have subordinated access and equity for all students, and especially in the context of urban schools, students of color.

Broader social issues that affect students’ lives manifest in the classroom and the current neo-liberal reform structures in education (e.g., the accountability movement combined with punitive discipline measures and structural classism/racism) fail to acknowledge the impact of these issues on student identity within school and community. While this era of standardized testing has brought about anti-democratic realities in schools of all sorts, it is also the case that schools that pass tests often enjoy a more liberatory climate while schools struggling to meet testing requirements are more likely to possess oppressive qualities. Not coincidentally, the more oppressive schools are often populated by poor kids, kids of color, and very often in urban schools, poor kids of color. Deficit thinking runs rampant in urban schools and marginalized communities – student experiences perpetuate oppressive social hierarchies and students are pushed to think that they can’t, won’t, and aren’t capable. Critical service learning, and more specifically photovoice as a form of critical service learning, has promise to provide a different kind of educational experience. This project is an exploratory qualitative study using photovoice, photo elicitation, and critical thematic analysis to determine what narratives students construct while participating in photovoice as a form of critical service learning. This study posits a way to move from deficits to possibilities by providing a space for traditionally marginalized youth to legitimize their sense of place, identity, and connection to their community while empowering them to be advocates for social change. Students served as action researchers, constructing counter narratives through an adaptation of photovoice documentation, addressing social inequities by highlighting strengths and assets in their own schools and community. In addition to using photovoice as a methodology, this study also addressed how photovoice as critical service learning pedagogy can serve to create discursive spaces for those counter-narratives to circulate and to be heard. This project addressed the need for a critical service learning approach in education that empowers students to become agents of change, using their own stories and cultural/social capital to disrupt deficit perspectives while promoting possibility perspectives – moving us closer to a more democratic public education.

Diverse populations of students in public schools have led to differences in how the phrase parental involvement is understood. The problem at one local elementary preparatory school in urban Southern California was this varied understanding on what parental involvement entailed, specifically in school activities. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of parents, teachers, and administrators regarding parental involvement and the influence of parental involvement on student academic progress. Bandura's theory of self-efficacy and Lee and Bowen's theory of social and cultural capital provided lenses into parental involvement and students' academic progress. A qualitative case study design was used with a purposeful sample of 5 parents, 8 teachers, and 3 administrators of 4th and 5th grade students at this preparatory elementary school. Individual interviews were transcribed and then subjected to constant comparative analysis until theoretical saturation occurred. Interpretations were then member-checked to ensure their credibility. Findings indicated all participants believed parental involvement was essential for students' academic progress, but differed in their views of the term itself. Parents believed involvement was ensuring homework completion, teachers believed parental involvement should be parent's engagement in every aspect of their child's life, and administrators believed parents were involved when they participated in school-wide committees. This project study is significant because the findings can be used by the local site leadership team to create workshops for parents, teachers, and administrators to help develop a common understanding of parental involvement and the influence parental involvement can have on student academic progress.

In the city selected for this study, only 29% of inner-city students scored proficiently on standardized tests, whereas 71% of their peers at nearby suburban and affluent schools achieved the proficiency level. To address the gap, the local district implemented ability grouping in one charter school. The purpose of this ex post facto quasi-experimental study was to examine the effect of ability grouping among inner-city students in mathematics as an instructional intervention for improving student achievement. Ability grouping theory as an instructional strategy was used as the theoretical framework for this study. The criterion measure of mathematics improvement was provided by the test results from the Northwest Evaluation Association's Measure of Academic Progress (NWEA-MAP), a computer-adaptive assessment of mathematics. Using population data for 2012-2014 inner-city 8th graders who took the pretest and posttest NWEA-MAP (N = 234), two 1-way analyses of variances were used to test for mean differences in the NWEA-MAP improvement scores between ability-grouped (n = 115) and non-ability-grouped (n = 115) students, then specifically between students who were grouped as high ability (n = 55) and low ability (n = 55). The ability-grouped students had significantly higher improvement scores than did the nongrouped students. For those students who were ability grouped, no statistically significant difference existed in improvement between the high and low ability groups. A position paper was developed recommending student grouping to improve academic performance of inner-city school students. Positive social change will occur as the achievement gap is closed for students who attend inner-city schools.