American Educational Research Journal

We use data from the Stanford Education Data Archive to describe district-level trends in average academic achievement between 2009 and 2019. Although on average school districts’ test scores improved very modestly (by about 0.001 standard deviations per year), there is significant variation among districts. Moreover, we find that average test score disparities between nonpoor and poor students and between White and Black students are growing; those between White and Hispanic students are shrinking. We find no evidence of achievement-equity synergies or trade-offs: Improvements in overall achievement are uncorrelated with trends in achievement disparities. Finally, we find that the strongest predictors of achievement disparity trends are the levels and trends in within-district racial and socioeconomic segregation and changes in differential access to certified teachers.

Although writing is often used for personal reflection in teacher education, it is less commonly leveraged to imagine educational futures (Gilligan, 2020)—particularly those centered on collective liberation. Amid intersecting social crises, however, imagining futures is critically important (Ladson-Billings, 2021), and writing is a crucial step toward bringing them into the present. In this participatory case study (Reilly, 2010), we explored the future-oriented writing practices of five early childhood teachers in an inquiry group. Drawing on critical literacy (Vasquez et al., 2019) and prolepsis (Cole, 1993), we describe how collaborative, creative, and pedagogical writing supported them in envisioning, enacting, and leading liberatory literacy pedagogies within and beyond their schools. Findings contribute to literature in teacher education, early childhood education, and literacy.

This study examines implementation of college-and-career-ready (CCR) education standards across five school districts in Ohio, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Drawing on the policy attributes theory, we found that the specificity of districts’ approaches to two long-recognized policy levers, curriculum and professional learning, was critical in shaping how stakeholders implemented and experienced CCR policies. We identified an approach we called “flexible specificity”—flexibility informed by ongoing data collection and evaluation that allowed districts to develop specific, useful guidance about curriculum and professional learning based on stakeholder needs. We present four shared practices characterizing this approach in two districts, analyzing why those districts seemed to find the right balance of specificity and flexibility while others struggled.

Climbing the ladder of institutional prestige is often promoted by leaders and policymakers in higher education, but there may be trade-offs associated with striving for status. This study examines the impact of Texas’s National Research University Fund (NRUF), which uses financial incentives to support institutions’ pursuit of prestige, on the salaries and employment of faculty. For full professors, the NRUF had a positive effect on the salaries of both men and women, but the policy also contributed to widening the gender gap in salary. In regard to employment, the NRUF had a negative impact on the share of women among full professors. The findings suggest that organizational pursuit of prestige may have unintended consequences for faculty gender equity.

At least 38 states have created service areas or “districts” for each of their community colleges. However, little is known about the geographic boundaries of community college districts and the policymaking process that defines them. We studied state policy documents nationally and the actual district boundaries of Texas community colleges to investigate the larger policymaking processes of determining boundaries. We found significant variation across the United States, including in who determines the boundaries and whether the districts have associated tuition reductions. In our case study, we also found evidence that the majority of Texas’s community college districts appear to reflect their larger local environments, although a small number may exhibit evidence of racial imbalance.

Supporting youths’ STEM dispositions takes an entire community of adults, yet we must understand the dispositions that adults bring to such community efforts, ways they influence youths’ learning and are shaped by the community. In this paper, we examine a sociotechnical system called Science Everywhere, which invited the broader community to interact with science learning experiences youths shared across home, school, and community settings. Integrating frameworks for disposition and asset-based community development, we present a case study of four focal adults within Science Everywhere embedded in one neighborhood. We make the case for a relational perspective of disposition development that leverages community members’ science and relational assets to foster dynamic, community-specific learning opportunities for youths, particularly those from resource-constrained communities.