Kathryn McDermott

• University of Massachusetts Amherst

Drawing on Boddie’s adaptive discrimination framework, this article analyzes changes in demographic trends from 2002–2021. Our findings reveal a continuation of several longstanding trends, including increased racial/ethnic diversity in public school enrollment; deepening racial isolation within districts; persistent, high isolation for Black stude...

The three terms comprising the Obama and Trump presidencies provide an opportunity to understand the evolution of race-conscious education policy in an increasingly multiracial, unequal, and divided society. Through document review and interviews with civil rights lawyers, government officials, congressional staffers, and intermediary organization...

The articles in this issue examine and document the emerging politics of education in the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on its present and future consequences for equity and social justice. It brings together education politics and policy perspectives on the PK-16 education system’s initial responses to the COVID-19 emergency. The arti...

In 2013, the Boston Public Schools (BPS) adopted the Home-Based Student Assignment Policy (HBSAP), which replaced elementary and middle-school choice within three large geographic zones with an algorithm that generates a choice basket of schools for each address based on proximity to the student’s home and a guarantee that all baskets will include...

Increasing numbers of states have incorporated measures of students’ academic growth into their data and accountability policies. Measuring growth is a statistically complicated task and complex growth measures can be easy to misinterpret. This paper reports on a survey of 317 Massachusetts principals’ understanding of the Student Growth Percentile...

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education made grants to eleven school districts under the Technical Assistance for Student Assignment Plans (TASAP) program. The impetus for the program came from the Council of Great City Schools, which was concerned that school districts would respond to a recent Supreme Court decision by dismantling policies with...

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education distributed $2,500,000 via a competitive grant program, the Technical Assistance for Student Assignment Plans, to 11 school districts. The grants and their local effects provide an opportunity to examine the new politics of diversity in public education. Participants cited a wide range of conceptions of div...

Many school districts have recently revised, or tried to revise, their policies for assigning students to schools, because the legal and political status of racial and other kinds of diversity is uncertain, and the districts are facing fiscal austerity. This article presents case studies of politics and student assignment policy in three large scho...

For decades, policy makers, advocates, and researchers have been engaged in efforts to make educational opportunity more equal for students from different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. A great deal of research has been conducted on their efforts; however, there is some disagreement on the extent to which the research has been influentia...

Since the 1990s, a growing number of urban schools have gained attention for their distinctive approach to academics and character education. These schools, most of them charters, share the stated goals of closing the racial achievement gap and preparing all of their students for college. In this article, we identify common elements of their approa...

Equity has long been one of the main goals of public education in the United States, even though public schooling has often fallen short of the ideal in practice. Notions of what educational equity requires have shifted over time. Currently, as this issue's articles show, many ideas about educational equity are contending with each other in policy...

Background/Context On June 28, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 (PICS) that school districts not currently under court order for racial desegregation could not, under most circumstances, use race as a criterion for assigning students to schools. Purpose In this article, we an...

Performance accountability has been the dominant trend in education policy reform since the 1970s. State and federal policies set standards for what students should learn; require students to take "high-stakes" tests to measure what they have learned; and then hold students, schools, and school districts accountable for their performance. The goal...

This paper presents case studies of changes to student assignment in three large school districts, Boston, Massachusetts, Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, and Jefferson County (Louisville), Kentucky. Our analysis is informed by the concept of “enclave schools” that came out of the Civic Capacity in Education study in the 1990s, and focuses on...

Advocates of educational accountability policies say that the policies are intended to use the state’s authority to ensure equal educational opportunity. Opponents make essentially the opposite claim: that expanded state power is intended to disempower local communities and to single them out for blame, in response to larger political and economic...

If you mention ?educational reform? in a room full of educators in the US, prepare to leave the room with your ears burning. For most teachers and school administrators in the US, ?educational reform? currently means standards, curriculum frameworks, mandatory state tests for students, and sanctions for schools if test scores fail to rise. Although...

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) represents the greatest extension to date of Federal authority over public school governance. In NCLB, Congress used its conditional spending power to push states and localities into enacting particular kinds of testing and accountability policies. This article places NCLB in the context of Congress's generally i...

Like many other states, Massachusetts enacted numerous changes to teacher certification policy during the 1980s and 1990s. During the summer of 1998, the state legislature and Department of Education made two especially significant changes: a signing bonus of U.S. $20,000 for an elite group of new teachers, and a state-funded alternative certificat...

Since the 1980s, most of the states and the U.S. federal government have enacted policies based upon the theory of standards-based education reform. These policies attempt to use incentives to overcome the difficulty of implementing policy in a loosely coupled system. This article presents a case study of the implementation of standards-based refor...

This article examines the educational conditions and resources, institutional characteristics, and political factors that contribute to shaping states' educational accountability policies. The policies addressed are identification of underperforming schools, state takeover or reconstitution of failing schools, and state power to replace principals...

This article examines barriers to college persistence for low-income, single mothers at a public university in the Northeast, and the strategies the women used in their efforts to overcome the barriers. Data for the study were drawn from in-depth interviews with 14 current and former university students. The women's strategies and resources for per...

This report reviews the practice of Affirmative Admissions as a strategy for achieving diversity within New England colleges and universities. It shows how educational leaders perceive Affirmative Admissions, the nature of regional Affirmative Admissions policies, and the numbers of student affected by current enrollment strategies. This report is...

Advocates of race-conscious admissions and attendance policies at the K-12 and postsecondary levels have recently emphasized the argument that public education authorities have a "compelling interest" in maintaining racially, ethnically, and economically diverse learning environments. Unlike earlier calls for integration, which rested on constituti...

No Abstact.

Abstract will be provided by author.

One of the most significant recent developments in educational governance is the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), an interstate collaboration that has produced standards in mathematics and English language arts. Two other interstate consortia are currently developing assessments based on the standards. This paper examines the governa...