Large Urban High School Research Articles

“My People Wouldn’t Stand For This”: Ethnic Studies as Critical Civic Education

Using testimonio method and methodology, this paper provides the stories and narratives of three Chicanx teachers who developed and taught an Ethnic Studies course to Latinx students in a large urban high school. Long celebrated as a way to fill in missing history, art, literature, resistance, and knowledge of communities of color, this paper argues that Ethnic Studies is also a vehicle to grow and embolden student sense of critical civic literacy. Through the narratives that emerge from these three teachers, the curriculum and pedagogy offered by these teachers positively impacts and propels students to advocate for themselves and their communities through civic and political action. The purpose of this article is to highlight the curricular and pedagogical choices of three teachers teaching Ethnic Studies and how Ethnic Studies can be used as a tool to increase Critical Civic Literacy.

Adolescent Feelings on COVID-19 Distance Learning Support: Associations With Mental Health, Social-Emotional Health, Substance Use, and Delinquency

PurposeSchool social support is associated with improved adolescent wellbeing. However, positive school relationships were potentially disrupted when schools transitioned to distance learning in 2020 to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This study investigated associations among perceived distance learning school support, mental health, social-emotional wellbeing, substance use, and delinquency among low-income, public high school students. MethodsWe analyzed longitudinal survey data, collected between June 2020 and June 2021, from 372 students attending five large urban public high schools. Mixed-effects regression models examined associations among changes in distance learning support and changes in mental health, social-emotional wellbeing, substance use, and delinquency, controlling for time, social-demographics, and baseline health. ResultsIn this predominantly Latinx (83%) sample, within-person increases in perceived distance learning support were associated with improved mental health, increased grit, increased self-efficacy, and decreased stress. Between-person differences in distance learning support indicated that students reporting greater support had improved mental and social-emotional outcomes. Although there were no within-person associations among distance learning support and hopelessness or delinquency, students with greater distance learning support (between-person) had lower levels of hopelessness and lower odds of engaging in any delinquent behavior. There were no associations between distance learning support and 30-day substance use. DiscussionSchool social support, even without students physically on campus, may be critical to adolescent health behaviors and social-emotional outcomes.

Designing Multiple Book Clubs to Meet the Interest of Diverse Populations

Reading for recreation has been an on-going problem for our high school so we decided to create an after-school book club. However, in large urban high schools with diverse populations, it is difficult to meet the interest of all students with one book club. In our school there are fifty-two languages represented and students from various backgrounds, ethnicities and academic abilities. Data was collected, analyzed and a question emerged. If we developed book clubs around the interest of students, would recreational reading activities increase at our high school? The following paper is what we found to be the answer.

Early College High School/Dual Enrollment 2.0

Urban and Metropolitan Colleges and Universities often serve a population that can benefit from an early college strategy. Colleges serving first-generation and low-income students often have lower retention and graduation rates than their peer institutions, as students from large urban public high schools can struggle to navigate the college classrooms and support system. While students may have achieved respectable GPAs and test scores in their high school buildings, they can fail to translate these skills at the college level, finding themselves on academic probation or worse. As researcher Anthony Jack has described in his landmark study, The Privileged Poor, students coming from large, urban districts are doubly disadvantaged by their experiences in schools; the skills that have allowed these students to get through their high schools are counterproductive at the college level (Jack, 2019).
 Using an evidence-based approach, programs being launched now by colleges and universities focus on the core missions of early college and dual enrollment programs, connecting youth less likely to attend college directly out of high school with powerful programming that propels them towards successful completion of degrees and to the start of their career. This article presents perspectives from a range of institutions (high school, two-year institutions, four-year institutions, and philanthropic investors) that are rethinking these models to maximize community impact and affordability to students and families.

Critical teaching in classrooms of healing: Struggles and testimonios

Using testimonio methodology, this article describes the testimonio and struggle of two Chicanx activist social studies teachers teaching in a large urban high school serving socio-economically poor Latinx students. Both teach critically working to develop their students’ understanding of how their ethnic and community histories contrast with larger historical narratives. Both teach the racism, misogyny, and homophobia rampant in American history by connecting it to the present. They also engage a culturally sustaining pedagogy to give students strength from their cultural inheritance. Each approached this differently, one developing an ethnic studies course, and the second developing a circulo de hombres, and embedding a youth participation action research. Each teacher tackled critical teaching and healing simultaneously from different perspectives yielding a variety of accompanying struggles.

“I’ve Always Been Scared That Someday I’m Going to Sell Out”: Exploring the relationship between Political Identity and Learning in Computer Science Education

While academic, cultural, and racial identities have been important concepts in sociocultural theories of learning and development, less attention has been given to political identity. Research on political identities in education tends to be limited to critical pedagogy or civic education contexts, leaving unexamined the role of political identity in supposedly neutral settings, like a computer science (CS) classroom. In this study I offer a conceptual framework that draws on theories of political identity and sociocultural theories of learning to illuminate a process I call disciplinary values interpretation—a process by which students reflect on the values of a disciplinary domain, as well as who they are and might become in relation to the domain. I then operationalize the framework by analyzing the ways in which students’ political identities interacted with their learning processes in a social design experiment conducted in collaboration with a high school teacher in a Computer Science and Technology academy of a large urban high school. Through case studies of two 10th grade students, Stacey and Lupe, I argue that the opportunity to design socially relevant technology provided new resources for disciplinary values interpretation, and had significant implications for how students came to view their own political identities and futures within the discipline of CS. This research has implications for ethical/political theories of learning and also contributes to enduring questions about identification and inequality in education.

A Literacy of Armed Love: Confrontation and Desire in Aesthetic and Critical Projects

The article argues that creative confrontations with damaging discourses as part of a critical literacy curriculum can be viewed as acts of love, for self and community. Using data from a multi-sited critical ethnography, the study considers the literacy productions of two focal students in diverse schools, a charter middle school and a large urban high school. Mediated discourse analysis of their work explores their aesthetic and critical literacy productions as refusals of oppressive discourses pressing against marginalized identities, and as expressions of desire for imagined, better realities. This research views such performances of multimodal creative resistance as an audacious literacy of desire, valuable as standards-meeting persuasive compositions, but also immeasurably valuable because of the emotional experience of the student producers, who were powerfully affected through the twin pleasures of resisting and imagining. This study illustrates how literacy projects might both inhabit and move forward Freire’s concept of armed love.

This is About Us: Drama Workshop as Patriotic Education

For 15 years, I was a drama teacher in two large urban high schools in Minnesota. My classes were designed with the belief that theatre requires the downplaying or even sacrifice of the individual for the success of the collective. Yes, these classes involved practices that helped students rehearse basic tools of performance but, more importantly, they required participants to work together as a group. Each semester-long class ended with a theatrical production written, produced, and performed by the students for audiences of their peers. Careful not to impose my vision on the content of their productions, I worked to facilitate open-ended playbuilding, which is a complex process by which people collaborate to consider a concept through the creation of a dramatic production (Norris, 2009).

Preferred intervention strategies to improve dietary and physical activity behaviors among African-American mothers and daughters.

The objective of this study was to identify cultural- and age-appropriate intervention strategies to improve dietary and physical activity (PA) behaviors in African-American adolescent daughters and their mothers. A convergent parallel mixed methods design with interactive quantitative and qualitative measures was used. Twenty-four 9th- and 10th-grade African-American daughters from a large urban high school and their mothers participated. Measures included the 2013 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System dietary and PA questions, 2013 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System dietary and PA questions, and BMI. Focus group questions covered preferred intervention formats and strategies for delivering a dietary and PA intervention. Fifty-five percent of daughters and 92% of mothers were overweight/obese. Mothers tended to prefer the group format (mothers/daughters together or mothers together) for delivering a dietary and PA intervention, while the daughters' delivery preferences were mixed. Top mother/daughter dyad strategy preferences for both dietary and PA were goal setting and use of rewards/prizes. These findings suggest several dietary and PA obesity intervention strategies that can guide obesity prevention efforts for African-American daughters and their mothers.

Classroom Discussions as Distortions

Ms. Mendez, English Department chair in a large urban high school, has noticed a persistent pattern in the practices of her colleagues. These practices tend to be racially insensitive and emphasize a noncritical view that does not attend to students’ experiences and positions students from a deficit perspective. Realizing that such practices serve as social reproductions of racist and classist orientations that reproduce the existing social order, Ms. Mendez decided school leadership should be informed. However, she worries that the school’s leadership will not work to enact change and instead will take her concerns lightly.

The Effects of the Great Recession on Educational Attainment: Evidence from a Large Urban High School District

Economic crises are a recurrent phenomenon in American society, yet there is little knowledge of the impacts on educational opportunity. Using data from a large high school district as a case study, this research explores the impact of the Great Recession (2007–2009) on high school senior graduation rates in an area at the epicenter of the Recession. A logistic regression model with cluster robust standard errors is developed to estimate the recession’s impact on student subgroups’ graduation rates between the periods 2004–2013 for maximum variation. Results show that students who are historically “at-risk” experienced significant declines in graduation rates at the beginning of the recession in 2008. The decline is followed by a steep increase in graduation rates beginning in 2009, largely driven by increases for the most disadvantaged groups. These results suggest that the recession created a counter-cyclical demand for education.

Visible School Security Measures across Diverse Middle and High School Settings: Typologies and Predictors

ABATRACTMany U.S. schools attempt to create safe learning environments by implementing visible security measures such as cameras, metal detectors, and security personnel. This study explored utilization patterns of visible security measures and several associated predictors. Data included school administrator and student responses from multiple waves of two nationally representative surveys. Three latent classes of visible security measures were identified. Membership in the heaviest security latent class was most likely among large urban high schools in the South and was associated with student race/ethnicity and school disorder. Implications for research on effectiveness of visible security measures are discussed.

#BlackLivesMatter

Michael Pelligrino is a novice principal in a large urban high school. After a rocky yet somewhat successful first year as the principal of Hilltop High School, tensions in the school and surrounding community are at an all-time high. The deaths of unarmed Black men, women, and children by law enforcement agents nationwide have led hundreds of students to participate in community-led protests aligned with the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Pelligrino is conflicted. Should he respond to the needs of his school community or continue to focus on district mandates? This case study provides opportunities for aspiring school leaders to engage in critical reflection and transformative leadership practices.

Promising teacher practices: students’ views about their science learning

Internationally, conceptual and procedural understanding, understanding the Nature of Science, and scientific literacy are considered worthy goals of school science education in modern times. The empirical study presented here reports on promising teacher practices that in the students’ views afford learning opportunities and support their science learning. The research is an illuminating case study of learning science in a large urban coeducational high school in New Zealand. The participants were one science teacher and his class of 28 students (age 13/14 years). Data were collected through classroom observations (63 lessons), a questionnaire, and interviews with all students in groups of 4/5. Illuminating examples of the six most promising practices and student views about how these practices helped them to learn science are presented. Practical work was common in the study class and was analysed for its effectiveness. The research was underpinned by a constructivist theory of learning.

The Role of Social Network Structure in Street-Level Innovation

In considering how peer relationships can aid street-level bureaucrats in doing their jobs, existing literature has emphasized the importance of peers in providing the social and emotional support required to deal with uncertain and stressful working situations. By applying a social network perspective to examine the innovative behavior of a sample of teachers in a large urban high school, this article highlights the importance of an additional factor: the location of a frontline worker’s position in the larger structure of social connections within the organization. In particular, multilevel statistical models reveal a positive association between the extent to which an experienced teacher is located in a network position that bridges across different organizational subgroups and his or her level of innovation, suggesting that experienced frontline workers may benefit from the information diversity that comes from having multiple and diverse social contacts. More generally, the study highlights the value of complementing individual and organizational insights with network-level perspectives for understanding the discretionary behavior of frontline professionals.

Assessing medical care availability for student athletes of a large urban high school district

BackgroundThe need for medical care for student athletes is mounting, as participation in high school athletics is continuing to rise. This study assessed medical care available to high school student athletes in a large, urban school district in California that has not been studied since 2002. By surveying athletic directors and coaches, we expected to find inadequate availability of medical care in the studied district and predicted that care would be more widely available for student athletes at larger high schools. MethodsWe developed and validated a questionnaire assessing practice and game coverage, emergency preparedness, treatment, and injury prevention measures. The survey was administered to athletic directors and coaches at a school district athletic directors’ meeting. ResultsForty‐three (57%) of 75 distributed surveys were completed. We found that 70% of schools did not staff a healthcare provider for practices, 28% did not staff home games, and 30% did not staff away games, for any sports. We found no significant differences between school sizes with respect to physician referrals after a student was injured, provision of health education, or implementation of emergency action plans. ConclusionsAlthough these data do not support our hypothesis of larger schools providing better medical care, it suggests that there are multiple areas of inadequate healthcare regardless of school size. We identified numerous gaps; thus, future work will examine the impact of these gaps.

Experiences with Autonomy: Learners’ Voices on Language Learning

Abstract: This article focuses on the experiences of Grade 12 students using a language portfolio based on the principles and guidelines of the European Language Portfolio (ELP) in their second language classes in a large urban high school. As part of a larger action-research project, focus group interviews were conducted to gather data related to experiences and perceptions regarding second language learning. In particular, the research questions focused on the learners’ experiences with the language portfolio and its potential role in contributing to learner autonomy. Three overarching themes emerged from the data collected from learners who participated in this study. These themes related to general perceptions of learning, to language learning experiences, and to experiences with the language portfolio. The article concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical linkages to learner autonomy and suggests implications for educators who wish to promote learner autonomy.

Effects of Perceived Teacher Practices on Latino High School Students’ Interest, Self-Efficacy, and Achievement in Mathematics

The author examined the effects of teacher caring, teacher content explanations, and teacher interest promotion on Latino students’ interest, self-efficacy, and achievement in mathematics. Participants in the year-long study were 326 Latino 9th- and 10th-grade students attending a large urban high school in southern California. Teacher variables made unique contributions to students’ interest, self-efficacy, and achievement after controlling for demographics and initial levels of interest and self-efficacy. In addition, the author found the 2 instructional practices—content explanations and interest promotion—to mediate the relation between teacher caring and interest, self-efficacy, and achievement. The author did not detect any moderating effects with respect to gender, grade level, English language proficiency, or initial motivation. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Women secondary principals in Texas 1998 and 2011: movement toward equity

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze data gathered in 1998 and 2011 from representative samples of women secondary school principals in Texas to identify differences in personal, professional, leadership, and school characteristics.Design/methodology/approachTwo proportionate, random samples were drawn of women secondary principals 13 years apart. The Texas Education Directory provided the sampling frame and school data were downloaded from the Public Education Information Management System. Principals were sent surveys including measures of situational and distributed leadership as well as demographic questions. Response rates of 65 percent and 42 percent were achieved on the 1998 and 2011 surveys respectively.FindingsWhile the percentage of secondary schools led by women principals shows little change and is similar to previous research, a more nuanced examination of these women and their schools evidences progress. The diversity for women administrators has increased and women are more likely to hold positions in urban schools. Years of teaching experience has decreased and women appear to be entering the profession at a younger age. Change on both variables reflects averages for male principals. Leadership scores indicated lower adaptability and more directive styles for women in 2011; however, scores on the Distributed Leadership Inventory were high.Originality/valueSchools led by women in 2011 possessed a larger proportion of students of poverty but no differences were noted in school enrollment or student passing rates on accountability tests. The authors encourage districts to continue fair hiring policies and argue women have become more competitive for the large urban high school principalships.

Using Extrinsic Motivation to Influence Student Attitude and Behavior Toward State Assessments at an Urban High School

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to discover the influence of a student achievement program implemented at one large urban high school that employed extrinsic motivation to promote student achievement on state assessments. Using organismic integration theory as the theoretical framework, 19 randomly selected students participated in structured interviews with their responses analyzed by the organismic integration theory taxonomy. This study invites a discussion of the use of extrinsic motivation to influence student attitude and behavior toward state assessments.