This essay provides the first account and examination of caste education in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. In so doing, I argue that caste education plays a central role in realizing the political and social goals of racial capitalist society for Du Bois. Using Du Bois’s caste analytic, I take up and articulate three biopolitical governing strategies of the racial capitalist state/industrial schooling regime. The final section ties Du Bois’s caste analytic to recent work in Afro-pessimist thought to look at the charter/choice debate. I argue here that Du Bois’s caste analysis, when paired with Afro-pessimist thought, shows how even critical scholarship on charter/choice policies fall short in their reliance on a model democracy and humanism based on antiblackness.

Our nation’s classrooms have become increasingly racially and ethnically diverse. Given these demographic changes, many policymakers and practitioners have expressed the need for increased attention to how teacher diversity might be linked to reducing racial/ethnic differences in teachers’ ratings of social-emotional skills for students of color. Using the most recent nationally representative data, we investigated whether kindergarteners have different social-emotional ratings when they had a teacher whose racial/ethnic group was the same as their own. We 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. Results are discussed in terms of implications for school disciplinary policies.

3. Defined by Outcomes or Culture? Constructing an Organizational Identity for Hispanic-Serving Institutions

While Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) enroll at least 25% Latinx students, the perennial question facing HSIs is, “What does it mean for postsecondary institutions to be Latinx-serving”—essentially an organizational identity question. Guided by the extant literature on organizational identity, culture, and institutionalism and using an in-depth case study of a federally designated, four-year HSI, this study focused on the way members construct an organizational identity for serving Latinxs. Findings suggest that while members constructed an ideal Latinx-serving identity based on legitimized outcomes (i.e., graduation), they constructed their current identity from environmental cues about cultural practices. Using two theoretical lenses, I present a typology that considers outcomes and culture in a Latinx-serving identity. Future research should explore the construction of a Latinx-serving identity in a nuanced way.

Full-service community schools aim to reduce educational inequality by addressing the multifaceted needs of low-income children and youth. Critical to this task is the ability of these schools to generate sufficient social capital to provide students, families, and teachers with essential resources. Using data from a qualitative case study, this article explores how social capital was manifested in an urban full-service community elementary school. Findings show that the principal, teachers, and staff were important sources of school-based social capital, which enabled the provision of services to students and families. However, resource scarcity and interethnic tensions threatened the expansion of social capital and the school’s transformative potential. We discuss implications of these findings for the theory, research, and practice of full-service community schools.

Large disparities in educational quality exist between cities and surrounding suburban school districts and are increasing between suburban districts—a trend that emerged over the past several decades and shows signs of growing. Using in-depth interviews, this study examines how children are sorted into different school districts across a metropolitan area. We find that the ideal educational arrangement for nearly all parents is to live in a neighborhood that guarantees access to neighborhood schools that meets their expectations, something we call the “package deal.” Parents look to the suburbs to achieve this ideal, but not all suburbs provide it. Metropolitan patterns of racial residential segregation, interact with families’ resources and constraints to reproduce racial inequalities in educational opportunities across suburban districts. Integrated approaches to housing and education policy are needed to address parents’ preference to couple residential and school choices and reduce growing suburban inequality.

Schools throughout the United States apply comprehensive community partnership strategies to address students’ in- and out-of-school needs. Drawing from models like the Harlem Children’s Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and full-service community schools, such strategies call for diverse professionals to reach beyond their own organizations to collaborate with complementary partners. Extant research on cross-sector collaboration focuses disproportionately on urban settings. This qualitative study examined three years of cross-sector collaboration in “Midvale,” a rural community in the western United States. Applying the conceptual framework of social frontiers, it illuminates how issues of difference, competition, and resource constraint impacted cross-sector collaboration in Midvale’s rural context.

7.Assessing Segregation Under a New Generation of Controlled Choice Policies

Student assignment policies (SAPs) in K–12 schools can either reproduce or help ameliorate existing inequality. Some districts are trying to maintain voluntarily adopted integration policies despite the Supreme Court’s recent 2007 decision in Parents Involved, which prohibited most race-conscious school choice policies that were effective and popular ways of accomplishing integration. While alternative policies with minimal or no use of race are still permitted, it is unclear whether they will create diverse schools. This research examines the new generation of school choice policies post-Parents Involved to understand how they affect diversity in our multiracial yet increasingly race-neutral era. Analysis of the use of a new generalized, race-conscious SAP in Jefferson County (Kentucky) Public Schools suggests that their plan is largely able to maintain integrated schools, albeit with some increasing racial segregation; economic segregation patterns are mixed. Moreover, the controlled choice policy has lower segregation than simulated, non–integration focused policy alternatives.

Effectively educating the large English learner population requires policymakers to ensure developmentally appropriate settings and services throughout the time students are learning English, as well as during their transition to fluent English proficient status—a process termed reclassification. Using longitudinal student-level data from two U.S. states (N = 107,549), the authors implemented recent advances in multi-site regression discontinuity designs to assess the effects of reclassification policies across districts. They found that reclassification decisions are heavily influenced by state criteria; however, there is considerable variability across districts in the extent of state-level influence. The authors also found robust evidence of between-district heterogeneity in the effects of reclassification on subsequent achievement and graduation. They discuss the implications of these findings for reclassification policies and future research on the topic. Looking toward the next century of education research, the authors discuss ways that multi-site regression discontinuity designs can be combined with qualitative research to enable policymakers and practitioners to better understand variation in effects of policies across contexts as well as the mechanisms underlying those effects.

Using data from seven cohorts of language immersion lottery applicants in a large, urban school district, we estimate the causal effects of immersion programs on students’ test scores in reading, mathematics, and science and on English learners’ (EL) reclassification. We estimate positive intent-to-treat (ITT) effects on reading performance in fifth and eighth grades, ranging from 13% to 22% of a standard deviation, reflecting 7 to 9 months of learning. We find little benefit in terms of mathematics and science performance but also no detriment. By sixth and seventh grade, lottery winners’ probabilities of remaining classified as EL are 3 to 4 percentage points lower than those of their counterparts. This effect is stronger for ELs whose native language matches the partner language.

10.Mohala i ka wai

Cultural Advantage as a Framework for Indigenous Culture-Based Education and Student Outcomes

The framework of cultural advantage calls researchers and leaders to reexamine the structures, paradigms, and practices of effective education. We argue that the moral imperative in this challenge is to critically scrutinize and counter the way education systems perpetuate systematic inequities in opportunities and outcomes afforded to certain groups in society, in effect curtailing cultural and linguistic diversity and innovation. Our findings from research conducted in Hawai‘i indicate that learners thrive with culture-based education (CBE), especially Indigenous students who experience positive socioemotional and other outcomes when teachers are high CBE users and when learning in high-CBE school environments. Educational progress will come from forward-oriented research and leadership that embraces the cultural advantages of students with diverse experiences of racism, poverty, cultural trauma, and oppression. By cultivating culturally vibrant and affirming learning environments in lieu of “one-size-fits-all” approaches, educators honor assets found in Indigenous knowledge, values, and stories as models of vitality and empowerment for all.

11.Embodied Brains, Social Minds, Cultural Meaning

Integrating Neuroscientific and Educational Research on Social-Affective Development

Social-affective neuroscience is revealing that human brain development is inherently social—our very nature is organized by nurture. To explore the implications for human development and education, we present a series of interdisciplinary studies documenting individual and cultural variability in the neurobiological correlates of emotional feelings. From these studies, we derive educational research hypotheses and a theoretical framework that facilitates integrating sociocultural and neurobiological levels of analysis. Our overarching aim is to begin to conceptualize a role for neurobiological evidence in educational studies of sociality, emotion, culture, and identity. Overcoming the historical distance between educational and neuroscientific research on social-affective development would enable a more complete science of human experience and enhance appreciation of cultural learning, benefiting both fields.

In this article, we argue that co-constructing knowledge, co-creating relationships, and exchanging stories are central to educational research. Relying on humanizing and Indigenous research methods to locate relational interactions in educational research allows us to engage in transformative praxis and storying, or Projects in Humanization (PiH). We contend that PiH focus on the creation and sustenance of relationships; the human capacity to listen to, story with, and care about each other; and the establishment of more inclusive, interconnected, and decolonizing methodologies that disrupt systemic inequalities found in Western constructs of educational research. More specifically, in this article, we rely on research vignettes to argue for a necessary commitment that researchers must have to sustain, extend, and revitalize the richness of the languages, literacies, histories, cultures, and stories of and by those with whom they work.