Introduction

As we enter the American Educational Research Association’s second century and the second half-century of this journal’s publication, we pause to take stock—to consider where education research has been over the past 100 years, where we are today, and where our research might go. Founded in 1916, AERA’s mission is “to advance knowledge about education, to encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the common good” (http://www.aera.net/About-AERA). As the Association’s flagship research journal, AERJ has played a vital role in achieving that mission; in many ways, the history of education research is the history of AERA and this journal. ¹ This once-in-a-century special issue both commemorates AERA’s 100-year legacy and pushes us to imagine new ways of fulfilling AERA’s mission. As Lagemann (2005) writes in answer to the question, “Does history matter in education research?,” “armed with powerful research, it is hoped—and hoped repeatedly—that we will surely know what to do to achieve progress, prosperity, opportunity, equality, invention, and security through education” (p. 10). We share this hope.

AERA’s temporal horizon spans momentous historical ground: the end of two world wars, ratification in 1920 of the 19th U.S. Constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote, a 1925 U.S. Supreme Court case that found high school teacher John Scopes guilty of teaching human evolution (a verdict later overturned on a technicality), the stock market crash in 1929, the 1953 discovery of the molecular structure of human DNA, and five years later, the Soviet launch of the first earth-orbiting satellite. The same year, in 1958, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a White man. This midcentury timeframe witnessed the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturning the “separate but equal” racial segregation doctrine; the 1963 march of 200,000 citizens on Washington, D.C., and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter established the U.S. Department of Education. In 1981, 192 years after the Supreme Court was established, Sandra Day O’Connor took the oath of office as the first woman Supreme Court justice. Eight years later, German protesters mounted and tore down the Berlin Wall. In 1994, democratic elections in South Africa made Nelson Mandela president, establishing the Government of National Unity and toppling nearly 50 years of racial apartheid. On the morning of September 11, 2001, four passenger airlines were guided toward destruction in three U.S. states, forever altering the world as we knew it. Minnesota passed the United States’s first charter school legislation in 1991, followed 10 years later by the ESEA reauthorization known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), now the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). In the midst of these latter events, U.S. citizens elected Barack Obama as the first African American President. ²

The string of events shaping our collective education research history goes on and on, and it is long. Each generation of researchers works within a unique social and historical context that shapes and informs our work— often in ways that we cannot anticipate.

In the early years of this historical panorama, eight White men, all directors of education research departments—seven in public schools and one at the Russell Sage Foundation—formed the organization that would become AERA. Originally named the National Association of Directors of Educational Research (NADER) and subsequently renamed the Educational Research Association of America (ERAA), ³ the organization’s mission was “to promote the practical use of educational measurement in all educational research” (Hultquist, 1976, p. 9). In their analysis of AERA’s first 25 years, Sherie Mershon and Steven Schlossman (2008) note that this occurred as

scholars and pubic school officials found common cause in their shared belief that empirical social science could provide both legitimacy and guidance for a complex—and controversial—project of expanding and rationalizing local school systems in order to make public education a vital instrument of social reform. (p. 308)

Thus, they write, the careers of AERA’s founders represent “a microcosm of the early twentieth-century alliance between applied social science and professionalized school administration” (p. 315).

Testing and evaluation would represent the major focus of AERA’s publications and annual meetings well into the latter part of the 20th century. “Establishing a scientific basis for educational practice mattered because science—or, to be precise, certain popular conceptions of it—occupied an exalted place in American culture,” Mershon and Schlossman (2008) state, adding that those conceptions privileged positivism, “fact gathering and the generation of useful knowledge” (p. 310).

The table of contents of AERJ’s first issue gives some indication of the focus on measurement to the exclusion of the pivotal social and political events of the times: “Achievement as a Function of Test Difficulty Level” (Sax & Reade, 1964), “Stability of Four Item Discrimination Indices Over Groups of Different Average Ability” (Feldt & Hall, 1964), “Relation of Section Variance to Achievement Gains in English and Mathematics in Grades 7 and 8” (Millman & Johnson, 1964), and “Response Sets in Standard and Experimental Personality Scales” (Edwards & Walsh, 1964). This topical and methodological focus is emblematic of the long-term domination of the field by educational psychology (beginning in 1910, the Journal of Educational Psychology was the primary education research outlet). As Francis Di Vesta and Robert Grinder discussed in a 1968 review of AERJ as it emerged from its “toddler stage”: “Subject-matter classification of AERJ articles showed unequivocally that the journal belongs in the domain of educational psychology . . . 90 percent of the papers reflect interest in learning, measurement, and student development” (p. 688; see also Baron & Narin’s 1972 analysis of research journals in education, and Allan Luke’s commentary in this issue, on this journal’s silence during a “key moment in American history”—the Civil Rights Movement). It would not be until the 1980s that articles with qualitative analysis in the titles appeared in AERJ, with Mary Lee Smith, at the request of editor Virginia Richardson-Koehler, publishing an article intended to “define qualitative research in education, describe what form an AERJ article based on qualitative research might take, and state some criteria that can be used by editors and referees to judge the merit of such studies” (Smith, 1987, p. 173).

The social-political context for knowledge production began to change in the post-Brown desegregation era of the 1970s, a period during which the Education Division of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare created the National Institute of Education (NIE). ⁴ Growing disillusionment with government-funded experimental and survey research on desegregation led NIE to fund six 2.5-year ethnographic field studies of urban desegregated schools (Schofield, 1991). Reporting on this research at a 1977 meeting of the American Anthropological Association and in a special issue of Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Dorothy Clement (1978) affirmed a now widely recognized truth: “[S]imply placing black and white students together does not . . . produce an end to stigmatization, . . . or an end to differential educational experiences” (p. 246). The NIE-funded studies were harbingers of a major artery of equity-focused education research that began to flourish through the next decades, broadening the epistemic, methodological, and disciplinary orientations brought to bear on AERA’s mission.

Meanwhile, NADER/ERAA/AERA grew from a select group of eight men—for the first 40 years, membership was restricted and “only a handful of new members were accepted each year” (Brief Description and History, n.d.)—to approximately 3,000 members when the first issue of AERJ appeared in 1964 (Figure 1), to more than 25,000 members today. As AERA’s membership has increased, so has the diversity of its members ⁵ and the disciplines and epistemologies that inform their scholarship (Banks, 2016; Cuban, 2016). Recent AERA presidents have challenged what had been dominant beliefs in the research community about student achievement, furthered a focus on students’ rights to learn, and proposed using research to create more equitable learning opportunities in schools (Banks, 2016).

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Figure 1.

Cover of the first issue of AERJ, featuring “teacher’s apple” motif.

A survey of the term equity in AERJ reveals a total of 340 manuscripts with the term in the full text: 1 manuscript in the 1960s, 2 in the 1970s, 26 in the 1980s, 65 in the 1990s, 124 from 2000 to 2009, and 122 from 2010 to the present. Between 1982 and 2016, 35 of those 340 manuscripts included the term equity in the abstract: 1 in the 1980s, 2 in the 1990s, 17 between 2000 and 2009, and 15 from 2010 to 2016. In broad strokes and in order of relative prevalence, equity-oriented research published in AERJ has included seven strands:

Much of this work, of course, addressed student learning as well as technology. Methodological orientations in these articles have ranged broadly from quantitative and quasi-experimental designs to qualitative/ethnographic, historical, and legal analyses.

With the increasing methodological diversity and focus on equity issues has come greater attention to understanding the role of social contexts in educational research. In a special issue of Educational Researcher addressing “Scientific Research in Education” (Shavelson & Towne, 2002), David Berliner (2002) argues that educational research is “the hardest-to-do science” (p. 19) because the complexity of contexts affects the capacity for generalization and replication of research. Teachers and students live and work in diverse and changing environments. “We should never lose sight of the fact that children and teachers in classrooms are conscious, sentient, and purposive human beings,” Berliner reminds us, “so no scientific explanation of human behavior could ever be complete” (p. 20). Hence, our scholarly community needs multiple methods to understand and affect these contexts in positive ways: “Our science forces us to deal with particular problems, where local knowledge is needed,” Berliner writes (p. 20). Writing in the same issue of Educational Researcher, Frederick Erickson and Kris Gutiérrez (2002) emphasize the importance of understanding particular educational contexts, arguing that it is essential to have qualitative documentation of how an education program was implemented to meaningfully interpret causal relationships embedded within those contexts.

In addition to using multiple research methods to understand how education programs work in specific contexts, recent scholarship, including the articles and commentaries in this special issue, demonstrates the importance of involving the communities that we serve as knowledge producers and collaborators in the research (e.g., Gutiérrez & Penuel, 2014; Snow, 2016). This scholarship speaks directly to AERA’s mission “to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the common good” (http://www.aera.net/About-AERA). Although AERA has long emphasized using research to improve education, ideas about how that might best be achieved are not necessarily shared (Cuban, 2016). Scholars are increasingly seeking to understand how partnerships between researchers and practitioners can generate projects that are relevant to and have the potential to improve education practice (Coburn & Penuel, 2016; Gutiérrez & Penuel, 2014; Snow, 2016).

Peering back into the past century, we can see the evolution of education research from behaviorist moorings to more complex cognitively based and sociocultural understandings of learning and teaching (Lee, 2016), and from the predominance of certain types of quantitative analysis ⁶ to the application of multiple methods. And yet, it is important to point out that even in AERA’s incipient years, there were calls for a broader and more inclusive, humanistic research lens. Reflecting on the organization’s first 25 years, AERA cofounder and former president B. R. Buckingham (1941) emphasized the need for research “to become more humanistic”: Education research “no longer puts its trust in tests,” he remarked, but rather “looks for meanings”—

It redefines facts and includes . . . such things as rights and responsibilities and hopes. . . . The research worker . . . has learned that when he sorts his factors out of their context they lose some of their meaning. Truth and fact he recognizes to be contingent as to time, place, and circumstance. (p. 363) ⁷

With this retrospective on AERA and AERJ, we prepared and disseminated a Centennial Issue Call for Proposals. We requested manuscripts that would present leading-edge, visionary research on critical education issues that substantively moves the field—and AERA—into the “next 100 years.” We received more than 100 proposals. From these, a panel of internal and external reviewers identified 27, the authors of which were invited to submit full manuscripts. These manuscripts underwent double-blind peer review, and the authors of 9 were invited to revise and resubmit. To round out the special issue’s coverage of education issues, contexts, and research methods, the authors of four additional manuscripts previously submitted to the journal, and which had been through several double-blind peer reviews, were invited to revise their manuscripts for the Centennial Issue. To achieve the highest quality for this once-in-a-century publication, all the articles herein underwent further blind peer and editorial team review and revision. We also sought a commentary on each article by a leading expert on that topic. The result is the 13 feature articles and accompanying commentaries that follow.

Looking across the 13 feature articles, we organized them and their commentaries into four “suites” based on themes among respective research goals and topics. The first suite of four articles and commentaries explores issues of race, ethnicity, and schooling experiences spanning kindergarten to higher education. The second suite examines school segregation, school access and resources, and reform efforts to address persistent education inequities across urban, suburban, and rural contexts. In the third suite of articles, authors examine two aspects of language learning and instruction: English learner reclassification and the effects of a dual-language model of language learning. The fourth and final suite of articles and commentaries considers social and cultural aspects of learning, showing the complementarity of perspectives drawn from research on culturally responsive schooling, neuroscience, and humanizing methodologies.

We open this special issue with two historical essays. It is fitting that we begin with Clayton Pierce’s “W.E.B. Du Bois and Caste Education,” followed by Edmund W. Gordon and L’Tanya M. Watkins’s commentary. Pierce presents a historical and sociological analysis of what Du Bois called “caste education”— public schooling in the United States—exploring the relationship between racial capitalism and education and the role of schools as a governing tool. The author compellingly argues that the U.S. public education system serves as “caste control in that schools in the neoliberal era help produce the political and ontological conditions of social death and social life.”

In their commentary, Edmund W. Gordon—mentee and close friend of Du Bois and an education scholar who has lived much of this Centennial’s history—and L’Tanya M. Watkins remind readers that “education can be thought of as a battle in which there are multiple participants.” Expanding on Pierce’s analysis, Gordon and Watkins encourage us to join Du Bois’s advocacy “for a broader and more substantive education for formerly enslaved people, and the cultivation of a talented subset . . . as the yeast and developers of this neglected population.” Keenly aware of human diversity and “the stupidity of . . . artificial social divisions,” Du Bois, Gordon and Watkins say, foretold the direction in which mainstream U.S. institutions would move well into the 20th century and beyond.

In a second historical essay on the politics of unofficial segregation in Kansas public schools, “‘In These Towns, Mexicans Are Classified as Negroes,’” Rubn Donato and Jarrod Hanson seek to understand the schooling experiences of Mexican children attending public schools in Kansas from 1915 to 1935—a time when “Mexicans became visible in Kansas.” The federal government classified Mexicans as White, which the authors explain is why Mexican students were not mentioned in segregation laws at the time. Drawing from primary sources such as Mexican consul records and secondary sources, the authors argue that “even though Mexicans were not referenced in the state’s school segregation laws, they were seen and treated as a racially distinct group.” The “past has much to teach us about race, education and segregation,” Donato and Hanson conclude, highlighting the importance of constructing educational systems that integrate Mexican students “without erasing them.”

In his commentary, James Anderson further contextualizes Donato and Hanson’s analysis, noting the tendency until relatively recently “to embrace a Black/White binary paradigm of segregation and racial inequality” and the “critical importance of writing the history of America’s variegated ethnicity.” The value of this, Anderson points out, and of research such as Donato and Hanson’s, is not only to gain a comprehensive understanding of the past, “but also to inform future struggles to overturn segregation and inequality in America’s schools.” In so doing, he adds, we expand the “capacity for civic engagement in the next America.”

The third feature article, “A Kindergarten Teacher Like Me,” by Adam Wright, Michael A. Gottfried, and Vi-Nhuan Le, brings these struggles into the 21st century. In this article, the authors explore whether students of color have higher social-emotional ratings when they have a kindergarten teacher of the same race/ethnicity and whether the findings vary by student or teacher characteristics. Using regression-based modeling to analyze a 2010–2011 national sample of African American and Latino kindergarten teachers and students, with White teachers and students serving as the reference group, the authors found that having a teacher of the same race was unrelated to teachers’ ratings of children’s internalizing problem behaviors, interpersonal skills, approaches to learning, and self-control. However, students whose teachers’ race/ethnicity matched their own had more favorable ratings of externalizing behaviors.

In his commentary, Allan Luke links the Wright et al. study explicitly to the previous commentary by Gordon and Watkins. Luke notes that Du Bois’s model of “double consciousness” helps us understand that minority students’ “experience is mediated by how they are perceived . . . by a cultural institution that is visibly run through the eyes and actions of a dominant racial/cultural Other.” Luke’s long-term work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia, and his experience as a Chinese American student in the Los Angeles public school classroom of Chinese American elementary teacher Herbert P. Leong on the precipice of the Civil Rights Movement, provide powerful evidence of the value of having a teacher who is visibly of students’ cultural background. “In habitus and bearing,” says Luke, Mr. Leong “was nothing less than kin.” Luke also critiques the silence in the pages of this journal on minoritized students’ experiences during this crucial period of the fight for education equity, inclusion, and civil rights.

Gina A. Garcia’s article, “Defined by Outcomes or Culture?,” extends the temporal and institutional implications of these issues into higher education, examining how one Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) constructed what it means to be a Latinx-serving postsecondary organization. In a qualitative case study of the pseudonymous Naranja State University (NSU), Garcia draws from literature related to institutional theory and cultural theory to understand the construction of organizational identity. Extrapolating from interview and observational data, Garcia identifies six indicators of how participants constructed a Latinx-serving identity: graduation, graduate school enrollment, employment, community engagement, positive campus climate, and support programs. Based on this analysis, she presents a typology of HSI identities, showing how NSU constructed a “Latinx-enhancing” identity in relation to those indicators. Garcia’s study highlights the need to better understand how institutions of higher education can serve Latinx college students, particularly with the growing Latino/a demographic in the United States.

In her commentary, Anne-Marie Nñez notes that the past century has witnessed a marked shift in higher education in the United States, “from providing education to a small number of students in historically ‘elite’ institutions” to offering universal education “to the most demographically diverse group of students ever, in the most diverse range of institutional types in the world.” Addressing the link between the provision of quality higher education and economic growth, Nñez emphasizes the need for institutional responsiveness to recent demographic shifts that position Latinos/as as the fastest growing population of students of color in the country. In this context, HSIs “constitute a critical part of the ‘marginalized majority.’” Thus, Nñez argues, future research and policy should identify additional metrics to assess institutional performance in serving Latinx students, advancing equitable postsecondary opportunities and attainment in a time of great demographic transformation.

The issues of racial segregation and education equality raised in the first suite of articles and commentaries lay a historical, conceptual, and empirical foundation for a suite of four subsequent articles and commentaries on full-service schools, race and class segregation in suburban schools, rural school reform, and recent controlled choice policies. In “Transforming Educational Experiences in Low-Income Communities,” Claudia Galindo, Mavis Sanders, and Yolanda Abel first examine how social capital functions in a full-service community school, Hope Academy (a pseudonym), serving approximately 200 students. Ninety percent of Hope Academy students qualify for free and reduced lunch (a poverty indicator), and more than half are English learners. This 2011–2012 qualitative study shows that the social capital developed through the school’s staffing and organizational structure was countered by racial and ethnic conflicts among parents surrounding unequal access to school resources. The authors make an important case for understanding the nuances of social capital development in full-service school reform. They also highlight the importance of designing programs that foster understanding and relationships among all racial and ethnic groups represented within a school community.

Gary Orfield, in his commentary, notes the need for more research on schools like Hope Academy, which aim to offer the “wrap-around” services needed to give children in low-income communities equality of education opportunity. “For a child from a low-income family,” Orfield notes, “what happens in the non-educational part of his or her life is often far more determinative than what happens in the classroom.” School leadership like that at Hope Academy is important, he adds, but, as the Galindo et al. study suggests, such leadership must be linked to the knowledge and skills needed to improve race relations within these schools. Research over the past century suggests the necessary conditions for successful interracial contact and prejudice reduction. “Deeply rooted issues of social division do not heal themselves,” Orfield emphasizes, but strong school leadership and research can illuminate strategies for alleviating racial division.

In the second study in this suite of articles, “Unwrapping the Suburban ‘Package Deal,’” Anna Rhodes and Siri Warkentien examine how families in the Cleveland metropolitan area—a highly segregated setting with a declining population—selected school districts in increasingly diverse suburban areas. Using census data to randomly select a sample of racially and economically diverse households, the authors sought to understand what parents in this area saw as the ideal schooling situation as well as how resources affect whether and where they move. Drawing on in-depth interviews with primary caregivers in 50 families, approximately half of whom lived in the city and half in a suburb, the authors found that all but 10 parents wanted the “package deal” of a home with a quality neighborhood school nearby. Many parents did not believe this option was viable in Cleveland (the city), but they generally had hope that it was possible in the suburbs. However, there were substantial racial differences related to parental financial resources and access to information and social networks that limited Black families’ ability to attain this “package deal.” The authors assert that more than 60 years after Brown v. Board and at a time of great growth in school choice as a reform policy, we are at a critical historical juncture to assess whether education policies are working for all families in the United States. Understanding how to improve the growing educational inequality among suburban schools is a crucial issue for both research and policy.

Annette Lareau and Hyejeong Jo, in their commentary, note that “although guided by powerful ideals of equality, American schools are deeply unequal and reform efforts have had limited impact on eroding this pattern.” Parents want good schools, but how do parents make decisions about the schools their children attend? Hence, there is a pattern of persisting inequality in school choice even as parents move to the suburbs. Lareau and Jo steer us toward the ways in which other countries such as Korea have begun to address these persistent patterns of education inequality. Moving into the next 100 years of research, these authors say, we need to better understand not only the outcomes of these trends but also the “mechanisms through which race and class educational stratification continues.”

Peter M. Miller, Martin K. Scanlan, and Kate Phillippo’s research, “Rural Cross-Sector Collaboration,” takes us to a largely White rural community in the Western United States, “Midvale,” a town of approximately 3,000, to examine how a cross-sector collaboration is cultivated and sustained. Cross-sector collaborations bring multiple agencies and organizations together to coordinate and enhance the education, health, and other services provided to children and families. Past research on such reforms has largely focused on urban communities. This qualitative case study focuses on the community leaders involved in cross-section collaboration through the “Kids Committee,” which, over many years, cultivated tightly knit relationships correlated with positive education outcomes. Key factors affecting collaboration included where community members lived or were from—inside or outside Midvale—and the relationships developed over time. Yet positive long-term outcomes were elusive as personnel retired or left the area. Miller and colleagues call for practitioners and researchers to attend to the factors in rural and urban contexts that affect the implementation and effectiveness of such community partnerships.

In her commentary, Mara Casey Tieken notes that historically, reform has been viewed as happening to rural communities rather than being undertaken by them. For many rural communities, she says, reform means educational dispossession, a “sentence imposed by outsiders.” The Kids Committee case study presented by Miller and colleagues represents a vastly different, “inside-out” strategy for generating change: “a wide-reaching partnership of community leaders with deep knowledge of and commitment to Midvale and its children.” But, she adds, “old habits die hard,” and top-down approaches linger. Future research, then, should “continue to examine these complexities of place” not only in comparing urban and rural settings “but also the legacies and borders that divide rural spaces, too.”

In the last article in this second suite of articles, “Assessing Segregation Under a New Generation of Controlled Choice Policies,” Erica Frankenberg examines school choice policies post-Parents Involved, a 2007 Supreme Court decision striking down Seattle School District No. 1’s voluntary desegregation programs, to understand how these policies affect diversity in our multiracial yet increasingly “race-neutral” policy era. To what extent are schools racially and economically diverse after the “new generation” of controlled choice policies? How does school racial and socioeconomic composition under this new generation of controlled choice policies differ from school composition under a non–integration focused student assignment policy (SAP)? Looking at Jefferson County Kentucky public schools, a low-income, traditionally Black-White district in which Latino student enrollments have doubled since 2006–2007, Frankenberg uses school- and district-level data from the NCES Common Core of Data and student-level data from Jefferson County to analyze trends in race/ethnicity, free/reduced lunch status, and kindergarten students’ applications and subsequent enrollment. She concludes that while schools under this new generation of policies are more diverse than if students were assigned under the simulated alternative scenarios, there is also evidence of growing racial segregation, particularly for African American students.

Commenting on the Frankenberg study, Jeanne M. Powers historicizes it within the earliest documented school segregation case in Boston in the 1800s, through Brown v. Board, and subsequent desegregation initiatives. Despite such efforts, says Powers, U.S. schools are increasingly racially and economically segregated. “Creating robust social policies that will address school segregation remains a central challenge of our time,” she stresses. The lesson of the Frankenberg study, Powers adds, is that controlled choice plans can indeed help maintain a district’s commitment to desegregation. Moving into AERA’s second century, a major effort of policymakers and researchers should be to “ensure that their efforts foster integrated schools” based on mutual respect and shared goals, ownership, and commitments.

A third suite of two articles and commentaries focuses on English learner (EL) policies and practices. In “Evaluating English Learner Reclassification Policy Effects Across Districts,” Joseph R. Cimpian, Karen D. Thompson, and Martha B. Makowski examine the average effects of reclassification on later achievement and graduation across districts and between-district variability in these effects. Using a multisite regression discontinuity design from student samples (N = 107,549) from two different states referred to as A and B and covering Grades 3–11, the authors find that reclassification decisions are heavily influenced by state criteria. However, there is considerable variability across districts in the extent of state-level influence. Moreover, they find between-district variability in the effects of reclassification on subsequent achievement and graduation.

In his commentary, Kenji Hakuta notes that the year 2064—AERJ’s Centennial year—will also represent the Centennial of the U.S. Civil Rights Act. Between now and then, the ESEA is due to be overhauled several times, and ELs are served through every part of the law. “What will a successful evolution of the law look like in the course of the next half-century?,” Hakuta asks. If historic policy structures endure, we should expect the civil rights framework in which the ESEA was born to persist alongside the continued diversification of the student population being served. Reclassification policies such as those addressed by Cimpian et al. “will remain issues as ESEA moves into the future.” Thus, future research should investigate how these policies are implemented, the meaning that policymakers and practitioners make of EL inclusion, and the risk that ELs in states with minimum N-size reporting requirements will “fall ‘below the radar’ and their needs will not be addressed.” More generally, Hakuta urges, researchers should examine “the multiple layers of federal, state, local, schools, and classrooms” serving ELs.

In “Effects of Dual-Language Immersion Programs on Student Achievement,” Jennifer L. Steele, Robert O. Slater, Gema Zamarro, Trey Miller, Jennifer Li, Susan Burkhauser, and Michael Bacon next report on a longitudinal study to examine the general academic effects of dual-language (also called two-way) immersion on native English speakers and ELs. Such programs grow out of the interests of both language-minority and language-majority parents and communities. Using a sample of 3,457 students who applied to a pre–K or kindergarten immersion slot in Portland, Oregon, for the fall terms of 2004 through 2014, this randomized controlled trial—rare in research on dual-language immersion—finds that students randomly assigned to immersion outperform their peers on state accountability tests in reading by about seven months of learning in Grade 5 and nine months of learning in Grade 8. Examining mathematics and science scores, these researchers find no statistically significant immersion benefit but also no detriment.

In commentary on the Steele et al. study, Guadalupe Valdés notes that over the course of AERA’s 100-year history, there have been two Supreme Court decisions on the role of non-English languages in U.S. education and a plethora of federal and state laws that both authorize and prohibit the use of non-English primary languages in school. Hence, the inclusion of bilingual education programming in this Centennial Issue “brings into focus the central position of language in American education” and constitutes a “welcome direction” in AERA’s research agenda. Valdés historicizes the study by Steele et al., noting that it represents a recent trend in research on bilingual education that responds to past critiques of bilingual education research (e.g., the lack of randomized assignment). Such research “opens the door” to future research on system-wide bilingual education programming, enabling researchers, educators, communities, and policymakers “to design educational contexts in which all children can thrive.”

A final trio of articles and commentaries focuses on the cultural and affective dimensions of learning and education research. In “Mohala i ka wai: Cultural Advantage as a Framework for Indigenous Culture-Based Education and Student Outcomes,” Shawn Malia Kana‘iaupuni, Brandon Ledward, and Nolan Malone present research grounded in an Indigenous theoretical framework of cultural advantage within the context of Indigenous education sovereignty. Centering their analysis on schooling in Hawai‘i—the only U.S. state with a single statewide public school system—these authors investigate teachers’ use of culture-based education (CBE), asking whether and how CBE influences students’ college aspirations, sense of belonging in school, self-efficacy, cultural affiliation, and connection to community. Using a regression-based analysis of teachers’ reported CBE use at 62 middle and high schools, Kana‘iaupuni et al. identify positive relationships between CBE implementation and students’ socioemotional development, self-efficacy, and community engagement. The authors conclude that CBE is well suited for further development and implementation, based on its efficacy for children, alignment with other research-based best practices, and appeal among a growing number of teachers pursuing greater relevance for learners.

In commenting on this study, Tiffany S. Lee notes that the findings are those that “many of us in the field of Indigenous education have been waiting to hear.” While a good deal of qualitative research has shown the benefits of CBE, there have been few quantitative studies demonstrating the connections of CBE to specific learner outcomes. Lee highlights four important contributions of Kana‘iaupuni et al.’s study: (a) the shift from deficit-based research to a reframing of Indigenous identities as cultural advantage; (b) the “double win” this research documents in promoting enhanced cultural knowledge and pride alongside heightened academic outcomes; (c) the ways in which CBE creates a rich learning environment that “entails much more than honoring Native peoples on a specific day, week, or month”; and (d) the potential of CBE to create an environment in which “all children blossom.”

In the second article in this trio, “Embodied Brains, Social Minds, Cultural Meaning,” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Rebecca Gotlieb conceptualize a role for neurobiological evidence in educational studies of sociality, emotion, and culture. Their premise is that human biological development is social. Informed by social-affective neuroscience, the authors explore the implications of this premise for educational research. Arguing that “our very nature is organized by nurture,” Immordino-Yang and Gotlieb present a series of interdisciplinary studies on the neurobiological correlates of conscious emotional experiences (“feelings”). Based on these studies, they derive a hypothesis and theoretical framework to integrate sociocultural and neurobiological analyses. They offer a compelling case for a stronger integration of neurobiological and educational research.

In their commentary, Roi Cohen Kadosh and Francesco Sella refer to this integration as a “biopsychosocial framework for affective development.” Noting the long-neglected link between the role of emotions in learning and educational achievement in education policymaking, they situate Immordino-Yang and Gotlieb’s study in a wide literature on children’s sensory and motor experiences, affective development, and mathematical cognition. Not surprisingly, they note, high levels of math anxiety are linked to areas of the brain associated with “visceral negative emotions”; this interferes with cognitive processing, furthering the cycle of low mathematics performance. More research is needed, Kadosh and Sella say, to examine how cultural meaning, social minds, and embodied brains interact with cognitive learning and achievement.

We cap off the feature articles in this Centennial Issue with Timothy San Pedro and Valerie Kinloch’s investigation of “Projects in Humanization” (PiH), a research approach that “focuses on the creation and sustenance of relationships” and “the establishment of inclusive, interconnected, and decolonizing methodologies.” Guided by critical Indigenous and humanizing research (e.g., Brayboy et al., 2012; Paris & Winn, 2014), Projects in Humanization address the importance of relationships between researchers and participants in education research. Drawing on qualitative studies with Indigenous and African American high school students in two different urban school settings, the authors present research vignettes that illuminate the ways participants’ stories become “a central unit of analysis.” San Pedro’s story concerns the ways in which he came to co-analyze and coauthor with a youth study participant and the ongoing impact of that relationship. Kinloch’s story tells how collaborating with a high school student allowed them to “co-create a humanizing educational space and curricula.” The authors argue against the concepts of objectivity and neutrality in research. Instead, they say, education researchers should focus on the lived experiences and needs of the people in communities with whom they conduct research. With PiH, San Pedro and Kinloch propose a reciprocal relationship that involves listening and sharing stories among the researcher and participants, thereby supporting “more inclusive, interconnected theories and methodologies.”

In the final commentary of this special issue, Carol D. Lee notes that research such as that by San Pedro and Kinloch represents important new scholarship “pushing the ontological boundaries surrounding how we think about the conduct of educational research.” In remarks that bring together multiple articles in this Centennial Issue, Lee notes that “we are at an interesting precipice” linking research in the neurosciences, learning sciences, and sociocultural and Indigenous Studies. Such multidisciplinarity is broadening “our conceptions of what it means to come to know in our complex physical and social worlds.” She also urges researchers to problematize what it means to “humanize” research, and in prioritizing community concerns, to recognize communities’ heterogeneous and variegated character. Building on San Pedro and Kinloch’s emphasis on relationality in research, another needed collaboration, Lee adds, “is between those who work in the PiH tradition and those explicitly focusing on political and economic systems.”

Viewing this Centennial Issue in its entirety, one cannot help but be impressed by the span of the temporal trajectory in these articles and commentaries, the enduring problems of inequality with which education research is engaged, and the multiplicity of social contexts and intellectual and methodological traditions brought to bear on those problems. And, as we collectively look toward the future, we cannot ignore the current social, political, and historical context in which we live and work, the deepening disparities in access to opportunities and resources, and the challenges this raises for a critical multilingual, multiethnic, multiracial democracy. We also question how our scholarly communities can model argument and civic discourse in our work. How do we engage issues of equity and justice with one another, our publics, and the communities we aim to serve?

We work in the present with both hope and concern for the future. Paraphrasing the quote by Lagemann (2005) with which we began, we concur that armed with powerful and richly diverse interdisciplinary research, there is good reason to hope—“and hope repeatedly”—that we “will surely know what to do to achieve progress, prosperity, opportunity, equality, invention, and security through education” well into the next 100 years (Lagemann, 2005, p. 10). Lagemann specifically argues for a broader embrace of the humanities in education research. To this we would add the need to enhance interdisciplinary connections with the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, sociology, economics, and the already transdisciplinary fields of Ethnic/Indigenous Studies, Gender Studies, and Global/Comparative/International Studies, to name a few. In this regard, we return to the words of AERA cofounder B. R. Buckingham (1941), writing on the occasion of AERA’s 25th anniversary. “I can wish you no better fortune,” he said, than that education research “may become still more humanistic” (p. 36). Recognizing that the aims of education research are many-faceted, as we look toward the next 100 years, we take heart in the hopefulness of these words.