Suchergebnisse

The U.S. K–12 public education system is fundamentally unequal. What efforts can facilitate students to become deeply immersed in the realities of the system and to embody the need for social change? This article investigates scaffolded, semester-long writing assignments to demonstrate patterns in the three tenets of critical community-engaged learning (authentic relationship development, reducing power differentials, social change orientation). The assignments come from three cohorts of a Sociology of Education course in which undergraduates spent early mornings walking with elementary school children. As efforts were made to deepen the community-engaged partnership, there is corresponding evidence in (1) the ways students humanized social problems through authentic relationship development, (2) the ways they detailed moments of youth-led activities in which power differentials were diminished, and (3) how students' reflective thoughts more frequently focused upon social change.

Over the past two decades, most states have adopted laws enabling charter schools, as charter advocates successfully presented charters as the solution to core problems in urban public education. Yet some states with large urban centers, notably Washington and Kentucky, resisted this seemingly inexorable trend for years. What explains their resistance? Furthermore, why did Washington—a state with a strong teachers' union and long-standing Democratic political control (resources for charter resistance identified in prior research)—ultimately adopt charters in 2012 while Kentucky has not? I use comparative-historical narrative analysis to trace differences in charter battles in the urban centers of the two states. I find that supporters framed charters as the solution in both cases but varied in their ability to name public schools as the problem in the first place. I identify the source of the discursive resources used by opponents of charter schools in state-level ''educational ecosystems'': the cultural and institutional legacies of a range of state educational policies.