This study used a developmental approach to investigate the relationship between academic and ethnic identities among ethnically diverse college students. The findings indicate that Students of Color perceive a greater connection between their academic and ethnic identities compared to White students, and that this difference can be partially explained by differences in ethnic identity.

This article examines how a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) endeavored to build its school as an inclusive environment open to students of different sexual orientations. Focusing on the semiotic dimension of spatial production, this article investigates how a conflict over a sign on the GSA’s bulletin board functioned as one front in an ongoing struggle to produce the school’s main hallway as a particular kind of space.

This article explores the ways in which district boundary lines and school desegregation policy impact metropolitan patterns of school and housing segregation. Results indicate that efforts to overcome the divisive nature of district boundary lines, in conjunction with comprehensive school desegregation policy, are related to unambiguous progress in combating school and housing segregation.

This article critiques the caricaturization of urban communities and their schools as places where students and community members lack agency and resources. Instead, through narrative inquiry, the authors reveal the community cultural wealth that they were exposed to as K-12 students in East St. Louis, Illinois.

This paper examines the use of Black Feminist Thought and critical race theory as conceptual and methodological frameworks to investigate the counter-narratives Black reentry women offer to three troubling and persisting stereotypes about Black motherhood.

Using structural equation modeling, this study examined the direct and indirect effects of family income on SAT performance for Black and White test-takers. Family income was found to have a nonlinear direct effect on total SAT performance and the association was substantially larger for Black students than for White students, especially for those families living in poverty.

This study reports that college students of color participating in a university-based community service learning program characterized the classroom experience within the program as offering a weaker sense of community than did their White classmates, and many expressed a reluctance to engage in race discussions with their classmates or to respond to perspectives they perceived as naïve, inaccurate, or offensive.

Using a national sample, this study uses multilevel modeling to understand how self-reported levels of academic engagement differ between women who attend single-sex and coeducational high schools.

Although Latinas’ relatively low rate of college-going has sometimes been explained by the influence of traditional gender roles, this article argues that sometimes it might instead represent emergent feminism and a means of contesting and remaking those roles. Based on a 5-year case study of one academically gifted Mexican American immigrant youth who decided to go to work instead of college, the article considers implications for Latina college recruitment.

Our comparative, multivocal ethnographic study of teachers in five U.S. cities in a number of early childhood settings suggests that immigrant teachers often experience difficulty applying their cultural knowledge to the education and care of young children of immigrants because they face a dilemma between their pedagogical training and their cultural knowledge; between the expectations of their fellow teachers and of parents; and between the goals of being culturally responsive to children, families, and their community and being perceived as professional by their fellow teachers and their superiors. This article details this dilemma and then focuses on how immigrant teachers’ funds of knowledge and power need further attention.

This self-study of practice explores how three mothers who are also educators negotiate their cross-class identities while living a curriculum of moral education with their children who are growing up upper middle class. The approaches and strategies of living a moral education curriculum chronicled in their stories offer a developmentally sensitive model of moral education that could, with modification, inform approaches to educating critical class conscious educators.

Introduction to the Special Issue

A commentary on the special issue.

Using data from the Digest of Educational Statistics, this article argues that an intergenerational comparison is a more productive, progressive method to interpret data used to gauge the achievement gap.

This article introduces the special issue, Disability Studies in Education.

Baglieri, Bejoian, Broderick, Connor, and Valle assert that imagining schools as places where children can find belonging and community conjures values and ideas with which few would argue, wherein democracy is posed as the political ideal of our culture. Within the context of this broad cultural and political discourse on schooling, the authors argue that the [re]claiming of inclusive education provides a heuristic concept and political agenda around which many strands of critical educational reform can cohere. At the center of this critique is the myth of the normal child—an idea of interest to scholars in the fields of disability studies in education, and disability studies more broadly, and an idea the authors seek to explore with critical scholars engaged in allied work seeking to contest, resist, and mitigate educational inequities. The authors contend that the commonality among a wide variety of ideologies of difference is rife with underexplored promise for allied work in inclusive education reform.

Erevelles draws simultaneously on the theoretical tools of both disability studies and queer theory, exploring ways in which both heterosexist and ableist ideologies operate (often overlapping and intersecting) as discourses of exclusion in schools. She argues that the regressive rhetoric of inclusion currently in vogue does little to critique how “Other” students, not just students with recognizable disabilities, are excluded by the normative discourses of schooling. Furthermore, Erevelles argues that for inclusive education to reclaim its transformative imperative, it would have to reimagine its original intent of (re)claiming disability by producing a refreshing new script that explores the radical possibilities of “coming out crip.”

Zion and Blanchett assert that the inclusive education movement in America has never had the potential to be truly inclusive, given the movement’s lack of attention to the intersection of ability/disability with issues of race, class, and privilege. Examining the overrepresentation of students of color in special education (segregated placements, in particular) within the historical context of public schooling in America, the authors contend that social justice, critical race theory, and interest convergence are powerful tools with which to [re]conceptualize a truly inclusive education movement in America.

Leonardo and Broderick elect, as a scholar of whiteness studies and a scholar of disability studies, respectively, to construct a piece that aims to critique “smartness” as an ideological system, with very real and differential materialist impact on students’ lives by operating as cultural “property” in schools. They engage in this critique simultaneously and collaboratively from the perspectives of critical race theory and from a disability studies in education perspective, critically exploring and asserting throughout the theoretical limitations and shortfalls inherent in exploring the issue from either perspective alone.

Ahram, Fergus, and Noguera explore how the social construct of the “normal child” is racialized through the special education processes of referral and classification, and subsequently produces disproportional representation of minority students in special education. Their analysis suggests a convergence of two distinctly problematic processes: (1) the development of racialized assumptions of cultural deficit on the part of education professionals that result in erroneous conceptualizations of disability and (2) the subsequent labeling of students in special education through a pseudoscientific placement process.

Ferri asserts that contemporary disability life writing can unravel the myth of normalcy that undergirds many of the exclusionary practices in education. Autobiography requires a particular set of critical reading practices to fully illuminate myriad ways these texts can serve as important and politically grounded counternarratives to the dominant discourse.

Having brought together scholars to consider inclusive education within both their own and others’ disciplines, research perspectives, and agendas, the authors reflect on what these contributions say—individually and collectively—about inclusive education. Furthermore, they critically consider what all of this says to and means for educational scholarship, schooling, and society at large. In this final piece to the special issue, the authors foreground ways that interdisciplinary conversations among critical scholars can serve as powerful arenas in which to forge alliance-building across disciplines.

This article combines a narrative inquiry into the experience of living with Asperger’s syndrome with a research review on issues related to mental illness and educational inclusion to argue that attention to neuroatypicality ought to be considered in a cultural consideration of multicultural and inclusive education.

This study used virtual reality technology to simulate a variety of reading disorders and examined their impact on the degree of teacher awareness on the cognitive experiences dyslexic pupils encounter while trying to read. It compared the effectiveness of VR to better enhance the awareness of the teachers with the effectiveness of watching a film, and found VR to be more effective.

This article describes the collaborative theory-building process used by a diverse creative team of academics, artists, teachers, and undergraduate students to develop a model to teach about race and racism through storytelling and the arts.

Callahan and Chumney use a comparative case study approach to examine the experiences and outcomes of remedial writing students enrolled in two urban public institutions: a community college and a research university. Applying Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this ethnographic study reveals that institutions further determine the advantage or disadvantage of remedial students by controlling their access to cultural capital, which is critical for navigating the field of higher education successfully.

This article reports an interview study examining the perceptions of school-to-home literacy practices held by African American and immigrant ESL parents in two urban communities in the northeastern United States.

This article presents a demographic overview of school-age children in immigrant families and compares them with their peers in native-born families. After tracing the shift in the national origins of children of immigrants that has taken place over the past century, we consider the new challenges and opportunities presented to the education system by the socioeconomic, cultural, and religious diversity of this new and growing population of students and by their presence in a growing number of suburban and rural, as well as urban, communities.

This article considers the ways in which school systems in New York City and Amsterdam have shaped the educational trajectories of two groups of relatively disadvantaged immigrant youth: the children of Dominican immigrants in New York and the children of Moroccan immigrants in Amsterdam. It describes the salient features of the two educational systems and the ways in which they structure opportunity for children of immigrants.

Research on integration processes still has a national focus. This article compares the school careers of children of Turkish immigrants across Germany and the Netherlands, indicating that their educational position differs significantly in the two countries. The national context works out differently not only for the group as a whole but also for men and women. The article explores these differences and provides some clues about the factors that determine them.