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The author shares an opportunity gap explanatory framework to assist educational researchers and theorists in analyzing, explaining, and naming educational practice, especially in highly diverse and urban social contexts. The author argues that too much attention is placed on achievement gaps and challenges researchers and theorists to expand their analyses to opportunity gaps. Focusing on opportunity allows researchers to examine the causes of disparities that exist between and among students in schools. Emerging from the author's own research and from an established body of theory and research, the framework encompasses five interrelated tenets essential to understanding and explaining educational practice related to opportunity: color blindness, cultural conflicts, meritocracy, deficit mindsets and low expectations, and context-neutral mindsets and practices. Implications of the framework point to potential synergy in language and research emphases that can shed light in the educational literature on deeply inequitable systems, processes, structures, policies, and practices that can prevent some students from reaching their full capacity.

We explore " Unapologetic Educational Research: Addressing Anti-Blackness, Racism, and White Supremacy" to engage scholars in thinking about and reflecting on what it means to conduct qualitative research from a standpoint that honors Black lives in the research process while also disrupting racism and white supremacy. First, we unapologetically take up topics including engaging "diversity" in qualitative research, interrogating the etic perspective in the "new" focus on race, using critical perspectives to inform research and practice, examining the racialization of positionality, focusing on Black women educational leaders, and engaging schools and communities. Next, we engage in dialogue with each other to push ourselves—and you/the reader—to think more deeply about the serious and potentially dangerous implications of our research decisions. Given the unprecedented historical present we are all experiencing in our lifetime, we are committed to shifting the landscape of qualitative research as well as using research to shift our sociopolitical context toward racial equity and justice.