US Public Education Research Articles

Got Cultural Citizenship? A Place-Based and Socio-Historical Analysis of Postsecondary Students’ Cultural Logics and Values at a Land Grant Institution in Southern New Mexico

ABSTRACT Using data from a 2013 Student Diversity Survey, this place-based analysis examines the cultural values, beliefs, and logics of postsecondary students from an Hispanic Land Grant Institution in southern New Mexico. The analysis explores the diverse social profiles of the students in the sample and how race, gender, and class statuses shape student’s cultural logics related to educational democracy. Relying on the concepts of cultural citizenship and settler colonialism, the author imagines a post-assimilationist education trajectory that celebrates the cultural wealth of working-class, students of color, and women students as they diversify US higher education. The findings show that these postsecondary students embrace cultural logics centering on interdependence and collectivism and reject cultural logics centering on individualism and independence. The author makes a case for expanding neoliberal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion approaches in US higher education to grapple with the foundational violences of Indigenous land dispossession and ongoing settler colonialism that maintains systemic inequities and exclusions in US public education.

A look at student performance during the COVID-19 pandemic

PurposeThis study aims to use self-reported publicly available student assessment data from the time period when there was an abrupt change in instructional method at the start of COVID-19 to assess potential for differences as a result of course delivery mode.Design/methodology/approachA general linear model using 837 student evaluations from 191 US public higher education institutions investigates the impact on student performance and how performance was related to a number of covariates, namely, online experience of instructor prior to shut downs, discipline of study and size of institution.FindingsThe analysis finds an overall grade point average (GPA) increase of 0.10 (out of 4.0) associated with the shift away from face-to-face instruction. In exploring potential covariates, only institutional size was significant in explaining this increase in GPA. This supports the notion that despite hardships inherent with the abrupt switch to online education across the country that student grades as a whole did not suffer.Research limitations/implicationsThe source of data was self-reported. In addition, GPA is an imperfect measure of student learning. Despite this, because GPA is highly correlated with student satisfaction, retention and matriculation, it is relevant.Practical implicationsThis study suggests that the rapid transition to online instruction did not negatively impact student performance and may have marginally increased these marks. These findings were cross-disciplinary and not influenced by the instructor’s prior online teaching experience. These findings support the idea that institutions and instructors should be more willing to use a variety of delivery modes going forward.Originality/valueThe data set used is uniquely large and varied in the number of institutions, professors, students and discipline. The COVID-19-induced transition from largely in-class instruction to mostly online or remote instruction allowed for a natural experiment that eliminates the sample selection problem associated with most other instructional method comparison studies.

Foreign language ideology and American Sign Language in US public education

AbstractAmerican Sign Language has been used at schools and programs for signing deaf and hard of hearing students in US history. Recently, American Sign Language (ASL) was offered as a foreign language to students who speak and hear for foreign language credit at American secondary schools. The movement of the language from its place in deaf education to one of the foreign languages taught in public general education is due to changing ideologies about ASL as a language and as a foreign language. Studies in spoken foreign language ideologies in education presumed ties between languages and national and sub-national ethnic and migrant language groups. No national and sub-national ethnic and migrant language groups have sign language as their mother tongue or are dominated by a signing populace. It raises theoretical issues in foreign language ideology, education, and sign language. Theoretical implications of this study for foreign language ideologies in education are discussed.

“Who else is gonna do it if we don't?” Gender, education, and the crisis of care in the 2018 West Virginia teachers' strike

AbstractIn 2018, a sequence of powerful education strikes and work stoppages across the United States sent shock waves through the country's public education system. This eruption of collective workers' organization was strongly led by women teachers responding to the current crisis of care, demanding resources, dignity, and justice for themselves, the children they teach, and their communities. While mainstream reports often represent these actions as traditional labor and/or feminist struggles, our research demonstrates that they were sites of more nuanced response to “care extraction” in education, and for understanding how constructions of gender and gender injustice both gave rise to the strikes and shaped their unfolding. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 10 teacher‐activists who participated in the West Virginia strikes, we examine how teachers' labor is being transformed in a context of postindustrial austerity, illustrate the complex political identity of the strike actions, and explore the relationship between specific constructions of gendered labor and collective organizing in US public education today.

How Austerity Politics Led to Tuition Charges at the University of California and City University of New York

AbstractThe size and cost of US public higher education, funded largely by government, grew continuously for nearly twenty-five years after World War II. In the late 1960s, as the nation's economic growth slowed, the question of who should pay for higher education came under fresh political scrutiny. Decades-old no-tuition policies at the University of California and The City University of New York (CUNY) became targets of neoconservative critiques of the proper role of government support for public services. In California, this was done as Governor Ronald Reagan promoted a partisan austerity to win favor with business and other conservative elites. He justified cuts to higher education financing as a rebuke of protesting students and inept administrators and, later, as financially necessary given voters’ reluctance to pay more taxes. In contrast, federal and New York State politicians forced austerity on city leaders to satisfy bond holders during New York City's severe fiscal crisis. Reformers argued that CUNY's no-tuition policy was emblematic of the city's overindulgence of its residents. No-tuition policies became impossible to defend in the context of the stalled economy and growing conservative movement, whose members embraced government austerity.

Applying UDL to Online Active Learning

In online environments, active learning techniques can facilitate varied ways that learners engage and enact skill development, understandings, and connections across concepts. The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework supports providing options and design flexibility. Using a multi-site, mixed method case study design, this exploratory study investigated how 23 instructional designers at three large, urban, US public higher education institutions view alignment between UDL and active learning approaches in online course design. Techniques, strategies, tools, enablers, and challenges of these practices are highlighted. Study data collected included survey responses and focus group sessions. Emergent themes of belongingness, social learning space, structuredness, and universality are discussed.

In search of 21st-century high-quality health education teachers

PurposeTeachers with subject-area knowledge and certification in their teaching content areas positively contribute to student academic achievement. This study aims to identify the trends in academic majors and subject-area certifications of K-12 US public school staff teaching health education during this century.Design/methodology/approachData were extracted from a comprehensive nationally representative survey of school employees conducted regularly by the National Center for Educational Statistics of the US Department of Education.FindingsApproximately 60% of the health education teachers indicated they were certified in health education during the study period. Nearly two-thirds of staff teaching health education did not have an academic major in health education. These findings suggest an ongoing trend of granting teachers state certification in health education devoid of any academic major in health education. Other increasing trends include staff with an academic major in physical education and no academic major in health education teaching health classes and certified in physical education teachers who were not certified in health education teaching health classes. Overall, students in the USA were not taught health education by quality or qualified health education teachers as defined by having an academic major and certification in health education.Originality/valueThe findings are a call to action to hire health education teachers who not only have certification in health education but also an academic major in health education, which is imperative to increase healthy behaviors, reduce risk behaviors and increase academic achievement among youth.

Sovereignty, citizenship and educating refugees in the United States

Public education in the United States acts as a governmental tool of neoliberalism, through which state power and sovereignty are deployed and transformed in daily life. Here, I examine how the divergence of sovereignty is exerted over refugee students and their families in US public education. Drawing on 42 months of ethnographic data collected on refugee and other immigrant networks in Southern Arizona, a US–Mexico border region marked by increasing anti-immigrant policies and practices, I reveal how the everyday practices and policies of one school district reflect and reinforce the government’s control over refugee students. I argue that the ways in which the students are sorted, marginalized, and denied opportunities as learners is inextricable from their positioning as non-citizens by the federal and state governments. Specifically, I demonstrate the linkages between the federal education policy, Every School Succeeds Act, Arizona State’s Proposition 203: English Language Education for the Children in Public Schools, which eliminated bilingual education, and the school district’s approach to teaching refugee students. Finally, I offer recommendations for creating more inclusive, assets-based learning environments for refugee students that push back against the neoliberal favoring of competition and one-size-fits-all solutions in public education.

Institutional Logics in Los Angeles Schools: Do Multiple Models Disrupt the Grammar of Schooling?

The structure of US public education is changing. Rather than exclusive district management of schools with standardized programs, new types of systems have emerged. In the case of “portfolio” syst...

ITINERANT CURRICULUM THEORY: TOWARDS A JUST PEDAGOGY

Abstract: In this article, I examine how Joao Paraskeva’s Curriculum Epistemologies deepens his previous work on Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) and discuss how this can be seen within the US public education classroom. I analyze (a) how the intricacies of ICT allow educators to fight for a just pedagogy by creating spaces of empowerment for youth and decolonizing the Curriculum; (b) how the standardization of US curriculum can be seen as an anti-ICT which helps teachers theorize spaces for ICT. This analysis of ICT reflects the need to struggle for social and cognitive justice through a just pedagogy of hope.

Desegregation policy as cultural routine: a critical examination of the Minnesota Desegregation Rule

ABSTRACT Education policies often result in and/or perpetuate inequitable and marginalizing outcomes. To that point, education policy may be viewed as an act of white supremacy. The purpose of this study was to examine the Minnesota Desegregation Rule (MR 3535.0100-0180) as a cultural artifact of race-related policy in US public education. Critical analyses of these types of policies offer a means to understand and document the status and workings of race and racism within a particular socio-political milieu. Three tenets from Critical Race Theory (the permanence of racism, the critique of liberalism, and law as a structural determinant) provided analytic tools to understand how the discourses related to race and racism act as cultural routines. The examination revealed nuances, contradictions, and patterns of power and privilege that serve as masked but powerful cultural signifiers. While legal and policy remedies are positioned as a means to reduce social and structural inequality, the Rule emphasizes bureaucracy and procedure and de-emphasizes student equity and racially equitable practices. Ultimately, the Rule relies on and perpetuates cultural routines that prescribe technical fixes to address deep structural, systemic, social, and institutionalized forms of racism.

Donation Starts With a Decision: The Role of the Individual and Family in Organ Donation.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Increasing the consent rate, both through the first-person authorization and family consent, provides perhaps the most significant opportunity to advance deceased organ donation in countries with some level of established donation programs. While in many countries, the primacy of an individuals’ decision to authorize organ donation is well documented, the participation of the family and family system play an essential role in end-of-life care and decision-making for donation and is less fully understood. The article by Delgado et al1 in this issue of Transplantation is an important contribution to provide a framework for the discussion of definitions for legislative structures and family roles within the legal construct. Particularly insightful is the crosswalk between laws defining the role of the individual and families in the consent process and the reported actual practices governing donation decisions. Examining and contrasting legal frameworks for donation with perceived actual practices through personal interviews reveals striking inconsistencies and ambiguities between local regulations and practices, an important caution as policymakers consider revising legal constructs with the premise that increased donation rates will follow. This study invites a call for standardization of nomenclature around definitions for consent and authorization as well as a need to collect better data on practices to understand the impact of laws on donation activity. In the United States, for example, the right of an individual to authorize organ donation has been well established in law for decades and strengthened in the 2006 update to the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act,2 and yet published data suggest wide variability remains in organ procurement organization practices in upholding and honoring donor’s decisions.3 Through national- and state-based efforts, the US public education efforts have emphasized a call for individuals to register as organ donors via registries, primarily through driver license application but increasingly through online, mobile-friendly registries.4 Such registrations carry a message that the first-person authorization is legal authority for donation and cannot be overturned by any other individual. With an obligation to honor a person’s legal decision, the organ procurement and transplant community should continue to move toward universal acceptance of the first-person authorization. Through effective communications with families and coordinated end-of-life care, donation can be facilitated even in the face of family hesitancy or resistance.5 With national registry rates surpassing 58%,4 the procurement community should continue to work toward consistency in honoring the donor’s decision in a manner that fully respects and upholds support for the relatives and family. Recent legal changes to introduce presumed consent in many countries have been to some extent driven by the assumption that opt-out laws lead to higher donation rates, often citing the Spanish experience as a proof. Such approaches have been taken despite responses from Spanish experts that the type of consent is insignificant in effecting donation activity.6 The Netherlands is set to implement opt-out laws in 2020,7 while an early report from Wales shows gains have been made in donation because presumed consent legislation was implemented in 2015, describing the increases as a “cause for optimism” while falling short of attributing gains to the legal change to presumed consent.8 Additionally, policymakers in many states in the United States have introduced, without success, legislation to change the US-based opt-in system to opt out.9 A structured and standardized approach to donation consent systems, both legal and in practice, provides a framework to study new approaches to improving donation authorization rates. The recommendations of Delgado et al1 should encourage and stimulate additional research on the roles and impacts of families in the donation ecosystem.

Change at the Micro, Meso, and Macro Levels: Connecting Across Research in US Public Education

The last several decades of research and practice in US public education have become increasingly focused on the design and implementation of reform efforts that seek to address inequities in academic performance observed in school organizations across the country. Central to these efforts is an interest in organizational change as new programs and interventions alter the ways and means schools go about their work. While a plethora of approaches to change in education exist, less attention has been paid to drawing connections across varying efforts in the field. One way to address this challenge is to cast a lens on change-oriented programs in education from the vantage point of multiple levels of analysis. Given that the theoretical and methodological traditions of micro, meso, and macro level empirical work varies, our understanding of whether organizational change in education is most effective when focusing on individual, group, or system level outcomes is limited. In this symposium, three works of empirical research in public education will be presented, each situated at a different level of analysis. The presentations highlight a range of change relevant outcomes such as individual work-related non-cognitive perceptions, group stereotypes, and organizational ambidexterity. By putting work at multiple levels in conversation with each other, a clearer understanding of the advantages and challenges of doing work at each respective level of analysis can be made clearer, thereby enhancing our understanding of how and when to use certain organizational change approaches. Career-related Non-cognitive Outcomes: A Network Analysis of a Higher Education Intervention Presenter: Cortney Evans; Harvard U. Presenter: Monica Higgins; Harvard U. Presenter: David Sherer; Harvard U. The Paradox of Stereotypes in Education Reform Presenter: Renee M. Rinehart; Harvard Graduate School of Education The Ambidextrous School System: Case Studies of Process Management Programs in Education Presenter: Maxwell Yurkosfsky; Harvard U. Presenter: Amelia Peterson; Harvard U. Presenter: Kim Furmin; Harvard U. Presenter: Andrew Volkert; Harvard U. Presenter: Jal Mehta; Harvard U.

From Hierarchical Power Structures to Rhizomatic Possibilities: An Argument for Affective Systems in US Public Schools

For more than 100 years, the US public education system has remained faithful to its hierarchical power structure, constructing knowledge at the top through state and federal efforts, then disseminating it down to districts, schools, administrators, teachers, and finally students. This paper argues that the assumed naturalism of this hierarchical power structure has resulted in a system that consistently fails to provide adequate services to urban, poor students of color as evidenced by the high rates of school dropout among this population. The contemporary issue of dropout in urban public schools is first located in the historiography of the Progressive Era. Next, a critically reflexive case study of the author's experience working as a dropout prevention counselor for a large urban school district is presented. Lastly, the issue of dropout is re-located through affective contextualization, articulating what could emerge with a shift from hierarchical power structures to rhizomatic possibilities.

A colonial history of the higher education present: rethinking land-grant institutions through processes of accumulation and relations of conquest

ABSTRACTThis conceptual paper examines the colonial conditions of possibility for a formative moment of US public higher education, the Morrill Act of 1862, and considers how these conditions continue to shape the present. The federal government’s accumulation of Indigenous lands in the nineteenth century helped provide the material base for land-grant legislation, and although conquest of the frontier was eventually metaphorized in higher education discourse, public institutions remain both dependent on and vulnerable to the imperatives of accumulation that were established during colonization, as is evident in contemporary privatization efforts. I argue that if efforts to resist privatization fail to address how colonialism has historically shaped US public goods, then these efforts risk re-naturalizing the imperative of capital accumulation and relations of conquest.

The Value of Home Education Including Physical Education

There is a false notion that public school can educate great students. Facing diversity of students’ potential, different timing of growth pattern and varieties of home preparation of students to be a assiduous learner it is serious challenging task. Schools offer a general education to all with some attention to the diversity of students. It is home education, dealing with concentration habits during learning process, valuing educational process and respecting the rules of group learning that are influential in acquiring most from the educational opportunities. School is not able to go against the home culture and re-educate students to behave as a concern and diligent learner if these habits are not emphasized or supported at home. Public education in US is ranked between 18 to 22 in the world (according to different sources). Comparing with the world, American schools as the whole rank first for school structures, are number one for allocation of school budget, the emphasis and requirements of teacher education is number one. America expenditure per student exceed the top ten of the world combined. It is the lack of home education of learning demeanor and respecting the learning process that causes the inferiority.
 Physical education faces the same general dilemma at school having a very diverse group of students within variety of growth stages, potentials, sizes and capabilities based on their previous experiences. Decent general physical education at school can only offer a limited advancement. It is the responsibilities of parents to learn about the specifics of healthy growth and suitable skill development for their unique child. It is their parental task to act responsibly for the healthy growth of their child concerning: bone density and health, muscular strength, size and endurance, heart development to endure the stress of activities and function well, the range of motion of joints and finally their weight management. All the above detailed items of children healthy growth present requirement for suitable activities to the development of skill learning. Suitably of activities matching the specification of child’s growth is crucial to their development. Expecting school with so many diverse population attend single child’s needs and direct the program to address them is an undue expectation.
 Home education make a difference in academic progress and proper physical growth and development of children. Being healthy and living healthy is a behavioral development to address potentials that can only be learned at home and may be strengthened at school, not the other way around.

The push and pull of open enrolment policy in metro Detroit

As US public education enrolment grows increasingly diverse, school choice policies create opportunities to break the link between residential and school segregation. They also create new pathways for families to self-segregate into ever more racially isolated schools. This study explores student enrolment patterns in Metro Detroit over a ten-year period to understand the implications of open enrolment policy on school racial and economic demographics. By focusing on the ten suburban districts that enrol the most Detroit resident students, we provide initial evidence that, while those districts increasingly enrol more Black and poor students than their residential population, many students from those districts are also taking advantage of school choice policy to enrol in districts further from the Detroit city centre. The in-flow and out-flow of students from these districts has implications for district budgets; design and implementation of school choice policy; and support for students in transitioning school environments.

Arbiters of effectiveness and efficiency: the frames and strategies of management consulting firms in US higher education reform

ABSTRACTA growing number of public colleges and universities in the United States have hired management consulting firms to help develop strategies aimed at increasing institutional effectiveness and efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to explore the frames and strategies of consultants in US public higher education reform efforts. Drawing upon a range of documentary evidence, the paper examines four consulting firms (Accenture, Bain & Company, Deloitte and McKinsey & Company) and their perspectives on higher education reform. The paper analyses the consultative process with two public universities and two state higher education systems to determine possible avenues by which consultants exert influence. Through reference to theory on academic capitalism and new institutionalism, the paper reveals the ways in which consultants circulate crisis narratives and diffuse private sector management ideas among public colleges and universities that are seeking both financial solvency and legitimacy.

State disinvestment, technologies of choice and ‘fitting in’: neoliberal transformations in US public education

Given state cuts to US public education, overcrowding and underfunding in urban district schools continue to grow. Yet, how parents understand the role of state disinvestment on underfunded and overcrowded public schools remains relatively unexamined. Drawing from an ethnographic study of school choice in Arizona, I explore how a group of white parents from diverse income and educational levels, who exited their child from a district school to enroll in a charter school, articulated state disinvestment in their everyday lives. Findings show that parents blamed local schools for what were largely the effects of state disinvestment. In particular, parents connected underfunding and overcrowding with a lack of district responsiveness to individual concerns to express the view that dire conditions were a personal and not a collective problem. Concurrent with the view that they were ‘were forced to choose’ a charter school due to a lack of district responsiveness, parents developed the belief that choice makes education more equal, especially for students who don’t ‘fit in’ to the district school. In total, findings highlight how technologies of choice enter into local cultural and material struggles to transform the relationship between parents and schools from a social to an economic one.

From the bottom-up: New York City teacher evaluation and the narration of mediated institutional assault

ABSTRACTFollowing the trend of consequential accountability in US public education, New York City introduced a teacher evaluation program during the 2013–2014 school year that linked teachers’ individual performance ratings with their students’ exam scores. As this program systemically alters the nature of teacher–student relationships by transforming students into the means to an end (teachers’ professional viability), this study investigated the implementation of this accountability program from the point of view of the teachers – those who were the subject of this new policy. This study of 15 teachers’ narratives from 3 distinct schools illuminates a social-organizational process that I refer to as mediated institutional assault – a perceived attack on the teachers’ sense of personhood and moral agency perpetrated by mediating figures whose actions were facilitated by bureaucratic policies and institutionally coordinated tools of control. Thus, this study reveals that the consequence of this new mode of accountability is not merely the threat of losing one’s job, but also an insidious form of psychological assault, which in its masked delivery violates teachers’ sense of relational morality and challenges deeply engrained beliefs about their role as educators.