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Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and A New Social Movement
Abstract
Jean Anyon's groundbreaking new book reveals the influence of federal and metropolitan policies and practices on the poverty that plagues schools and communities in American cities and segregated, low-income suburbs. Public policies…such as those regulating the minimum wage, job availability, tax rates, federal transit, and affordable housing…all create conditions in urban areas that no education policy as currently conceived can transcend. In this first book since her best-selling Ghetto Schooling, Jean Anyon argues that we must replace these federal and metro-area policies with more equitable ones so that urban school reform can have positive life consequences for students.
... These educational reforms have all made similar surmountable claims that students living in poverty can achieve at high levels through increased accountability without taking into consideration the institutional inequities that exist and the lack of awareness and attention paid to their social, cultural, emotional, and historical barriers. Many other attempts at the local (city/school) level have also been unsuccessful in increasing and sustaining the educational achievement of students attending schools in low-income communities (Anyon, 2005;Blankstein et al., 2016). The paradox lies in the reality that these accountability movements inevitably prevent and decrease creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication needed to increase academic achievement in all content areas (Csuvarszki, 2016). ...
... The paradox lies in the reality that these accountability movements inevitably prevent and decrease creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication needed to increase academic achievement in all content areas (Csuvarszki, 2016). In addition, research demonstrates that the prevailing and pervasive out-of-school factors, macroeconomic systemic inequities, and the disposition of educational leaders continually negate and supersede any and all educational policy and reform efforts (Anyon, 2005;Berliner, 2013;Kozol, 2005). ...
... Contrary to this deficit perspective is the understanding that individuals living in poverty are only socially, culturally, and linguistically different and have their own vital abilities, skills, and life experiences, called "funds of knowledge," that they have acquired from their diverse experiences and life struggles (González et al., Amanti, 2009). Although we acknowledge that there are many out-of-school factors (Berliner, 2009) and larger economic, social, and racial systemic deficiencies that go beyond education which impact student success (Anyon, 2005, Ulluci & Howard, 2015, a funds of knowledge orientation shows that teachers can use the practical and intellectual tools, knowledge, and experiences that students have as resources for learning in the classroom (Macias & Lalas, 2014). Gee (2013) calls this the diverse student's primary Discourse with capital "D," which reflects: ...
The dispositions of school leaders play an integral role in dismantling inequities that hinder the academic achievement of students, particularly students living in poverty. Recent studies bring to light the importance of an asset-based understanding of what children bring to the classroom and how to draw on these assets in creating opportunities for student success. A paradigm shift is taking place whereby school leaders must lead with equity as a foundational thought when assisting teachers in recognizing, valuing, and honoring the assets that students bring to the classroom. This paper attempts to discuss critical issues pertaining to educational equity by using related literature on the topics of poverty and transformative leadership as well as data collected from 15 participants consisting of administrators, teachers, parents, community members, and students who were interviewed in the study employing qualitative narrative inquiry. Additionally, it makes
recommendations relative to the dispositions school leaders must employ, embrace, foster, and practice in addressing the social, cultural, and emotional needs of students to elicit and enhance effective engagement in school.
... To begin, we overview the literature relating to our development of this project, after which we outline the theoretical underpinnings of our analyses, which draw heavily from Anyon (2014), who describes the systemic nature of inequity and how that impacts the viability of urban education reform efforts. Next, we outline our methods, which we label policy focus groups, our process of analysis, and our analytical approach, which is critical of the ways in which schooling negatively and disproportionately impacts specific student populations. ...
... xvii). It is our intention with this paper to address both of these "crises," first by presenting data culled from interviews with experienced urban teachers regarding the concrete realities that they face in their schools, and, second, by positioning these findings within a larger theoretical framework (Anyon, 2014) that critiques the ways in which (and reasoning for) the failures of urban education reform efforts. To be more specific, in our efforts to more fully embed our research according to Milner and Lomotey's call, we feel that this particular research has the capacity to critically assess the micro issues that manifest in urban schools (from the perspectives of teachers) and the macro issues that limit the success of urban education reforms as a whole. ...
... Specifically, cultural political economy demands that attention be paid to the larger context in which particular phenomena occur, while at the same time acknowledging the agency that individual actors have to act upon those contexts. We find that Anyon (2014), who traces the ways in which urban education reform efforts are characteristically misguided as the result of their misplaced attention to school contexts (vs. macroeconomic policies that structure those contexts), provides a helpful framework for doing just that. ...
We present analyses from focus group interviews with a geographically diverse set of experienced, urban teachers who point to systemic inequity as a major contributing factor to the problems they face in their schools and communities. To begin, we overview the literature relating to our development of this project, after which we outline the theoretical underpinnings of our analyses. Next, we outline our methods, process of analysis, and analytical approach. We then discuss our findings, highlighting how the teachers described the systemic nature of inequality, and the policy solutions they identified as potential avenues by which to address these inequalities.
... Unlike their White peers, Black and Brown students have been explicitly targeted by decades of harsh surveillance, policing, and mass incarceration (Hinton, 2016;Meiners, 2007;Miller, 1996). At the same time, they have been subjected to diminishing support for education and other youth development and social welfare opportunities (Anyon, 2014;Hill, 2016;Lipman, 2011). We characterize this situation as racialized institutional exclusion, racialized institutional neglect, and racialized institutional violence by the very institutions explicitly charged with ensuring their education, protection, and well-being-schools, juvenile courts, police, and the city, state, and national governments overseeing these. ...
... Historicizing School-to-Prison Pipelines: Sociocritical Approaches A growing body of research describes a "school-to-prison pipeline"-a metaphor for the relationships between punitive school policies, notably discipline policies, and inappropriate arrest and incarceration of Black and Brown students (Hall, 2020;Heitzeg, 2016;Kim et al., 2012;Laura, 2014;Mallett, 2016a;Mallett, 2016b;Meiners, 2007;Nocella et al., 2018). Despite attention to the STPP, researchers describe insufficient understanding of the complex historical, political, ideological, and institutional processes hardening the school/prison "nexus" (Meiners, 2007, p. 6;Sojoyner, 2016) and call for (1) critically historicizing research on the STPP (e.g., Sojoyner, 2016;Winn and Behizadeh, 2011) and (2) expanding "what counts" (Anyon, 2014;Meiners, 2007, p. 3) when studying the STPP to include political, economic, and institutional policies that are expanding "carceral apparatus[es]" (Shedd, 2015, p. 80) and a "culture of control" in schools (Rios, 2017, p. 155). ...
... The upshot is that Chicago schools, particularly those on probationary status, were under intense pressure to, in the words of the CTU, "push out troubled low-performing students" (CTU, 2012, p. 16). Accounts by the CTU, as well as by Anyon (2014); Ashby and Bruno (2016), and Lipman (2011), all reveal how educational reform policies, notably those unfolding in Chicago before and during this study, serve to punish rather than incentivize schools reenrolling students after detention. The CTU's and researchers' concerns about high stakes accountability pressures arising out of Chicago school reforms in the early 2010s triangulate and support students' accounts of being turned away. ...
Most students released from detention never return to school. This study uses youth participatory action research and Social Justice Youth Development Theory to explore the experiences of those who do. Findings demonstrate that formerly incarcerated students want to return to school but face institutionalized resistance that amounts to racialized exclusion, violence, and state-sanctioned neglect at Chicago's school/prison nexus. We offer recommendations on how to "reverse" the school-to-prison pipeline by shifting educational and youth policies from surveillance and control to care, harm reduction, and greater youth and community
... We hear of low performance on standardized tests, chronic absenteeism, and teacher shortages through blaring headlines and primetime news (Goldstein, 2011). Unfortunately, the blame for these "failures" are often placed upon students, teachers, and community members rather than efforts being taken to understand the root of political and socioeconomic forces that perpetuate systemic oppression within public education (Anyon, 2014). Nevertheless, young people, teachers, and community members continue to resist. ...
... Moreover, students and teachers join in solidarity in order to disrupt the ways in which racist, classist, and sexist systems of oppression harm children and young people within PreK-12 classrooms. To this end, youth-centered, youthled, and intergenerational social change movements become prominent examples to realize radical possibilities in education and beyond (Anyon, 2014). ...
The primary purpose of this critical qualitative action research project is to analyze the possibilities, contradictions, and limitations of youth organizers as essential partners in teacher education. More specifically, this research project examines the impact of designing and implementing a community-based social studies methods course alongside youth organizers and their adult allies. There is limited research in teacher education literature about partnering with youth-centered and youth-led grassroots organizations. In addition, research pertaining to community-based teacher education does not adequately affirm and center the voices and lived experiences of youth organizers who are social change agents in schools and communities. In turn, this action research project acknowledges and disrupts existing systemic barriers in order to bring teacher candidates and youth organizers together through dialogue and reflection for transformative action. This process enhances teacher candidates’ understanding and use of community-based pedagogy while supporting youth organizers in their social justice work within schools and communities. Informed by participatory and community-based methodologies, the findings of this action research project provide implications for teacher educators who are seeking to foster collaborative partnerships with youth-centered community organizations and intergenerational community members. In this way, teacher educators may curate community-based teacher education programs that are stimulated by and benefit local schools and communities. Importantly, the collection and analysis of data sources is reciprocal and accountable to participants in order to support their ongoing efforts to grow as organizers, educators, and community members. Such practices are informed by place-conscious and culturally sustaining pedagogies in order to seek and sustain transformative social change through education.
... Some educational scholars have extended this ideology, and see schools and educational leaders at the forefront of such social change and collaborative partnerships (Anyon, 2014;Elmore, 2000;M. Fullan, 1993;Payne, 2008). ...
... Overview Project Quest depicts collective action that arises from a communityorganizational base that shifted into a cross-sector partnership and program over time. As San Antonio city residents felt the economic ramifications of the closure of large manufacturing plants within the city, they also recognized the suburban and metro areas around the city had thousands of jobs in other fields such as health care, mechanics, and education (Anyon, 2014). ...
Background/Context: Theory suggests that improving the education system and improvement of educational outcomes will require collective action generated by cross-sector partnerships. Yet as multi-sector groups attempt to pursue collective work, understanding the connection between collective commitment, collective action, and the role of race may be paramount to realizing change. Purpose/Focus of Study: The purpose of this study was to examine how collective action (via cross-sector partnership work) has been and could be used to address large social problems, and how collective commitment contributes to the success (or lack of success) of the collective action pursued by cross-sector initiatives aiming to make change in communities of color. Research Design: I first present a review and synthesis of four historical cases that examine how collective commitment and action was established and pursued within two grassroots (community-based) initiatives and two grass-high initiatives (initiatives started or charged by those with high influence and power). I drew data from primary and secondary sources that spoke of and/or provided an evaluation of these initiatives and conducted a two-phased analysis of each case first focusing on the contexts and mechanisms through which collective action was pursued with what outcomes and second on the role that collective commitment played. I then present a narrative of each case using these frameworks, followed by a cross-case analysis. Second, I provide an extended case study of a local grass-high initiative--Highland County My Brother’s Keeper-- where I spent a year researching and working with the initiative as it evolved. I addressed the same questions as with the historical cases, using participatory ethnographic methods, and drawing on data from audio recordings of 13 team meetings, team meeting notes, 30 interviews with participants, field notes of informal interactions, personal reflections, artifacts developed, and electronic communications. Lastly, I use critical race theory (CRT) to challenge the narrative of all cases, and examine evidence of how White interest-convergence was employed as a racial negotiation strategy across all 5 cases. Conclusions/Implications: I find that the grass-high initiatives attracted powerful people to the table, yet the initiatives pursued by the grassroots cases were more sustainable, and these groups were also more successful in developing collective commitment. Analysis also revealed that race was indeed crucial to the ways in which commitments were acquired. Whereas all partnerships showed evidence of using White interest-convergence as a racial negotiation strategy, this tactic did not guarantee successful outcomes. Rather, creating spaces that privileged the voice, needs, and desires of communities of color, as each grassroots initiative did to some extent, appeared to make a critical difference in the collective commitment that was garnered and collective action they accomplished. This work and findings are significant because they challenge cross-sector leaders to consider whose interests are truly being served and think about the intricate connection between collective commitment, race, and power in a praxis-based way.
... Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963) While confined in a Birmingham jail for his leadership and activism in the U.S.'s civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King stressed the interrelatedness between different communities and struggles for social justice. King's words and activism draw our attention to the interrelatedness between struggles in schools and how they are fundamentally connected to struggles in communities (Anyon, 2014;Berliner, 2006). A growing interest in how principals address educational inequities has emerged (Cambron-McCabe & McCarthy, 2005;Furman, 2012). ...
... Other scholars described the relationship between schools, community organizing, and social movements. Anyon (2014) wrote about the possibility of schools becoming a new center of social movement organizing that puts urban education at the center of attempts to build a politically progressive movement. One theoretically strategic reason for the centrality of urban educators is that inside poverty-stricken city schools are the congealed result of economic and other social hardships impinging on urban families. ...
A growing interest in how principals address issues of social justice in schools has emerged with an emphasis on critically interrogating school practices, policies, curriculum, and instructional approaches. Yet, many injustices, which prompt calls for social justice, are created outside of the school by larger socioeconomic arrangements and require greater consideration and collaboration between schools and communities. Given the interrelatedness of schools and communities, this study explores the principal's role in addressing social injustices through activism and utilizing the community's resources and emerging political opportunities to promote social justice.
... Fourth, thoughtful theorizing about social justice in American schooling abounds (e.g., Gewirtz, 2006;Gewirtz & Cribb, 2002;Llopart & Esteban-Guitart, 2018;Lewis, 2016;Mills & Ballantyne, 2016), as do extended arguments about its importance (e.g., Anyon, 2005), research reviews (e.g., Llopart & Esteban-Guitart, 2018;Sampaio & Leite, 2018); and standards (e.g., Burns & Miller, 2017;Ohio Department of Education, 2011; Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, 2021) that advise and even require educators in PK12 and postsecondary contexts to attend carefully to equity, diversity, and social justice. There is every reason, in consideration of the evidence and advice, for practicing educators to do something about inequity in schools. ...
... Fifth, changing social justice practices in schools has thus far proven very difficult: despite ample theorizing, argument, research, and activism (Dorling, 2010;Glass, 2007;Johnson, 2014). According to many commentators over the decades (Anyon, 2005;Blacker, 2014;Glass, 2007;Kozol, 1991;Rigby, 2014;Tye, 2000;Valenzuela, 1999), the difficulty lies in how prevalent and deeply embedded are greed and prejudice in American society: ...
The United States is an inequitable society growing more inequitable in recent decades, and schooling is both part mechanism of oppression and part pathway toward social justice. Improving the extent to which schooling actually contributes to equity, however, depends on efforts to cultivate educator practices that advance social justice. Defining these practices and measuring their use among school faculties are necessary parts of the improvement process. Unfortunately, adequate measures of collective social justice practice in schools have not been developed for use with teachers. Based on a conception of social just as a three-part structure, we report progress on developing a 22-item instrument to measure collective social justice practice in schools, using data from teachers about their schools (rather than about their own practice). This report explains the rationale and conceptualization of the instrument, argues its intended use and its validity relevant to the intended use, accounts for item development, and presents empirical evidence of the relationship of items to the construct and of the construct to contextual variables. We argue an intended use in the summative evaluation of professional development that aims to foster improvement in collective social justice practice in multiple schools. Empirical work (exploratory factor analysis and correlation) supported the theoretical model and showed that the proposed measure is unrelated to political orientation. Although additional validation studies are certainly necessary more fully to establish validity for the intended use, the considerable work thus far completed on the items should prove helpful to other researchers struggling to measure social justice practice in schools in an historic era of increased concern for equity. Schooling is widely acknowledged as a contributor to inequity in American society, in part via a "hidden curriculum" that governs norms of practice in schools...
... Critical education scholars argue that rather than seeing the educative space as neutral where the teachers impart knowledge to their students, teachers need to see their students for who they are and what they bring to the school setting in ways that enrich and empower all students. Giroux (1997), Kinshloe et al. (2011), Anyon (2014 among others argue that it is important to see how power and knowledge interact in the creation of the educational sphere and how these create a right way and a wrong way of knowing and thereby commit epistemic violence throughout the teaching and learning process. These theories draw attention to how schools and educational institutions transfer traditions and knowledge of the dominant class/groups within societies, which more often than not revolve around whiteness, heterosexuality, cis-gendered subjectivities, and middle-class values (Brantlinger, 2003;Francis, 2017;Greteman, 2018;Lareu, 2003). ...
Iceland has often been depicted as a progressive society regarding the issues of gender equality and sexual diversity. Furthermore, queer issues and non-heterosexuality, is mentioned in the national curriculum from 2001. However, LGBTI/queer students and teachers are not very visible in schools and educational institutions. Moreover, some researchers have suggested that institutional processes are widespread in many educational institutions, which police and silence non-heterosexuality, and sustain a discourse of heteronormativity. Thus, in this paper our aim is to discuss the concept of epistemic violence and how it can be applied when evaluating how LGBTIQ students and reality are still excluded in the curriculum, educational policy, and within educational spaces in Icelandic schools. We draw on interviews with 8 students who identity as LGBT/queer and various policy documents. In our analysis we draw on queer theory which can provide a theoretical framework and perspective both for teachers and researchers in order to bring about changes; to transform education to serve the needs of all students. This is particularly important within educational contexts where the values of the dominant class and culture are often reproduced and forced upon the “other”.
... Further, employed blacks and Hispanics are much more likely to work for, at, or near, poverty wages. Even earning a two-year or bachelor's degree does not provide a buffer from the negative dual reality of racism, and the low geographic availability of, yet high demand for, low-paying jobs [68]. ...
As the language of “college and career readiness” continues to permeate American public education, the fixation on preparing students for college and careers is potentially harmful for students, particularly urban students of color. In promoting “college and career readiness”, certain assumptions are taken for granted: that American schools are sites of egalitarian meritocracy and not spaces of social reproduction; that tomorrow’s job market desires more individuals with formal education, and that the jobs market will be viable for tomorrow’s willing workers. Here, we argue that as “college and career readiness” continues to be the dominant approach in American schools, it ignores the realities that the workplace of tomorrow is growing harsher as corporations continue their efforts to maximize profits by keeping labor costs low by reducing worker participation and seeking cheaper labor. Simultaneously, American students of color are more vulnerable to tomorrow’s workplace in that they continue to experience racial discrimination coupled with the growing tenuous nature of the future domestic job market. Thus, students who are being schooled in “college and career readiness” have to contend with the possibility that, though they are more formally educated, the economy of tomorrow may still deem them expendable.
... Leadership for parent engagement takes place within a context. The broader educational environment is hierarchically arranged (Anyon, 2005) in Western societies, including provinces such as Ontario (Curtis, 1988;Murphy, 1997). As such, it is necessary to look at the cultural issues at play in the education system with reference to its structures. ...
This paper looks at strengthening parent engagement in education, focusing on leadership strategies for reaching and supporting parents. The qualitative case study of a district’s multiple approaches for enhancing parent engagement involved 8 individual and focus group interviews, observations, and document analyses. The superintendent and principals shared leadership with school councils for developing initiatives. They collaborated with community organizations to provide parenting support, social services and resources to enable participation. Despite some success, the leaders were challenged to establish engagement programs widely across the district due to a managed, hierarchical, organizational structure and limited parent input on educational goals. The research contributes to a discussion of enhancing relations among families and schools to promote all students’ academic achievement and wellbeing.
... Furthermore, DeVos volunteered as a mentor in Grand Rapids Public Schools, but has never taught in a public school. However, by understanding the ways powerful corporate tycoons like DeVos negatively impact public education and the common good, we are able to arm ourselves with radical, loving, and hopeful knowledge in order to dismantle the neoliberal hegemonic state (Anyon, 2014;Buras, 2011;Lipman, 2001;Pedroni, 2011). ...
... Contemporary expressions of concern about inequity have been prompted by evidence about race-based differences in how schools implement their discipline policies [5,6] and the seemingly intransigent challenges schools face when confronted with significant increases in immigration [7]. A spotlight has been shone, most recently, on how deeply into our social fabric are the roots of social injustice [8][9][10] by striking variations in the risks encountered by, and the resources available to, families and their children during the Covid pandemic. Concerns about inequity have never been more widespread or garnered more public energy than they do now. ...
This paper reviews the results of 63 empirical studies and reviews of research in order to identify those school leadership practices and dispositions likely to help improve equitable school conditions and outcomes for diverse and traditionally underserved students. Guided by a well-developed framework of successful school leadership, results indicate that most of the practices and dispositions in the framework can be enacted in ways that contribute to more equitable conditions and outcomes for students. A handful of these practices and dispositions appear to make an especially significant contribution to the development of more equitable schools as well as several additional practices and dispositions associated with equitable leadership merit mastery by equitably-oriented leaders. Among the especially significant practices are building productive partnerships among parents, schools, and the larger community as well as encouraging teachers to engage in forms of instruction with all students that are both ambitious and culturally responsive. Leaders are likely to be more effective when they adopt a critical perspective on the policies, practices, and procedures in their schools and develop a deep understanding of the cultures, norms, values, and expectations of the students’ families. The paper concludes with implications for practice and future research.
... Policymakers must focus on policies that improve opportunities in schools and neighborhoods. As Anyon (2005) argues, education policy must be considered as more than regulations regarding curriculum, pedagogy, and testing to include policies that better neighborhoods and family well-being, such as poverty reduction and desegregation efforts. Haslip and Gullo (2017) succinctly summarize this when they state, "we need...systems-thinking to protect holistic child development, where family and community well-being are recognized as inseparable" (p. ...
... Furthermore, it is important to document the day-to-day impact that these complex reforms have on children's lives so that policymaking accounts for the social and academic needs of young people. In order to fully realize Anyon's (2005) social movement theory, schools of education across the country must come to value interdisciplinary and community-based approaches to redefining what is social science research and recognizing the inseparability of the university's mission to the interests of the public it is charged to support. ...
... As noted by Ladson-Bilings (2005), diversity in the teaching field means portraying an accurate picture of today's current multicultural and democratic society -one that includes gender. Despite the demographic significance of Latinos in the United States and its public schools specifically, who constitute nearly one fourth of all K-12 students nationally, it is clear that any undereducated group of people is not only far less likely to compete globally and promote economic growth for local communities, but is also less likely to participate in conventional politics (i.e., voting), less likely to have access to fair wages, health care, and thriving communities (Anyon, 1997;. ...
The lack of proper representation of women of color in the field of bilingual science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is a crucial matter when addressing the needs of the US as a country moving toward diversity and inclusion. The research project represented in this paper investigates and addresses the need for teacher preparation courses that will adequately set up their bilingual preservice teachers to enter into the field with the proper background experiences to engage their future students in STEM related lessons. Findings reveal the negative ideologies related to gender bias found in teacher education, the importance of STEM related women empowerment, and how those vested in STEM education must continue to debunk the impostor syndrome felt by students in STEM related fields. Despite the challenges present for women in bilingual teacher preparation programs in STEM, we must continue to create sanctuaries where students of color can thrive in environments that are conducive to their unique experiences and fulfill their learning needs in STEM.
... Policymakers must focus on policies that improve opportunities in schools and neighborhoods. As Anyon (2005) argues, education policy must be considered as more than regulations regarding curriculum, pedagogy, and testing to include policies that better neighborhoods and family well-being, such as poverty reduction and desegregation efforts. Haslip and Gullo (2017) succinctly summarize this when they state, "we need...systems-thinking to protect holistic child development, where family and community well-being are recognized as inseparable" (p. ...
Preschool children are suspended and expelled at a rate greater than school-aged youth, and exclusionary discipline practices are further inequitable across racial and ethnic groups. Denied the documented benefits of early childhood education, Black students are disproportionately excluded from US educational institutions beginning in early childhood, effectively preserving and reproducing racial inequities. Black students, especially boys, are the most likely to lose access to schooling due to exclusionary discipline. The disparities are dehumanizing and detrimental to students’ opportunities to learn, as early educational experiences greatly influence development and future outcomes. Although there is a plethora of evidence concerning the significant role of space, place, and relationships in early childhood education, less is understood about how these act independently and interact to create racial and ethnic disparities in discipline within pre- schools. In this conceptual paper, we argue that decolonizing early childhood education requires a novel approach in how we think about racial inequalities in discipline that centers the conversation on context and incorporates the interrelated frame- works of geography of opportunity, ecological systems theory, and the youth control complex. Children’s interactions with adults in school are situated in a particular space and place and within a complex nexus between the school, home, and neighborhood contexts. It is imperative to decolonize geographically stratified classroom management, manifested through exclusionary school discipline of young children, for the possibility of more equitable educational opportunity.
... The purpose of this conceptual paper is to review the emergent literature on DT in education, position DT within a philosophical framework, and discuss the scholarly significance of this framework to future studies and practice. Educational systems have been designed to reify and even expand current socioeconomic, racial, and marginalized community disparities (Stovall, 2016;Anyon, 2014). With the onset of global crises such as COVID-19, famine, social unrest due to increases in socioeconomic disparity, and the increased marginalization of communities that do not conform to Eurocentric colonial valued norms, DT may have increased relevance to education . ...
Design thinking (DT) has demonstrated promising use in a wide variety of fields. Rather than a method, DT represents an approach that requires relinquishing preconceived notions of solutions, having a high tolerance for ambiguity, seeking to identify needs before engaging in problem-solving, being human-centered, and engaging in a reflective process. This concept paper was based upon the author's personal experience as active scholarly practitioners at T/K-12 school sites, a literature review, proposed a framework, and argues that DT represents an approach to advance constructivist practice in the classroom and across school operations. Scholarly significance included a philosophical framework for DT and implications for classroom and school practice.
... Student adversity is documented to remain in a post-resettlement context for multiple reasons, including increased politically driven nativism and xenophobia (Lemke & Nickerson, 2020). In line with our theoretical approach, we thus paid particular attention to a wider ecological context, cognizant that where urban schooling is concerned, discriminatory federal and metropolitan policies have contributed to urban-suburban spatialization patterns and substandard and/or more select, but segregated public schools and social provisions (Anyon, 2014). In sum, while our aim was to understand a phenomenon within a singular school context, we had a secondary goal of authentically and ethically situating ourselves within the school setting so to offer actionable practitioner steps and research-based guidance to those interested in studying a comparable phenomenon. ...
A growing corpus of interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on migration, particularly the increasing intensity of forced migration, or displacement, and the sociocultural, political, and symbolic dimensions of global resettlement. Yet, there are limited empirical studies on how U.S. educators in urban contexts address these processes, including but not limited to displacement-based trauma and associated student needs. While educational scholarship has examined structural issues affecting increased educator burnout, a research paucity also exists regarding how educators experience relevant stress related to these dynamics. This article presents findings from a multi-method qualitative case study that examined how high school educators leveraged available educational policy and practice supports to address refugee and hurricane displaced student needs. Our research underscores multi-level system complexity that influences school-related resettlement processes, and specifically as relevant to supporting student mental health and mitigating educator stress. Utilizing a critical and social ecological theoretical approach, our findings offer a framework for anti-deficit, cultural and linguistically responsive, and trauma-informed student practices, who in rebuilding a new home in the U.S., can experience continued and new forms of marginalization. Implications for educational research and leadership practice are discussed.
... 2013a;Scott et al., 2015;Pinkard et al., 2017;Lachney et al., 2019a). While there is little doubt that the focus on informal learning environments is productive, especially considering the roles that schools play in reproducing inequities (Margolis et al., 2008;Anyon, 2014), we also believe that without more attention to CRC in formal contexts the current state of underrepresentation is unlikely to improve. The limited amount of research on CRC in formal CS contexts highlights instances of deep engagement with culture-computing connections (e.g., Sandoval, 2019), as well as instances where there can be improvement (e.g., Davis et al., 2019). ...
Background: As teachers work to broaden the participation of racially and ethnically underrepresented groups in computer science (CS), culturally responsive computing (CRC) becomes more pertinent to formal settings.
Objective: Yet, equity-oriented literature offers limited guidance for developing deep forms of CRC in the classroom. In response, we support the claim that “it takes a village” to develop equity-oriented CS education but additively highlight the roles of cultural experts in the process.
Methods: We use a case study methodology to explore one instance of this: a collaboration between a multi-racial team of researchers, a Black cosmetologist, and a White technology teacher.
Findings: Three themes supported the CRC collaboration: multi-directional relationship building, iterative engagement with culture-computing, and collaborative implementation of a hybrid lesson.
Implications: As opposed to orienting broadening participation around extractive metaphors like “pipelines,” our case study constructs the metaphor of an “open village” to orient CS education toward collaborations between schools and the communities they serve.
... xvii-xviii) . Educational inequity exists because of structural racial and class-based inequalities (Anyon, 2014;Berliner, 2013) ; calls to remedy these problems with culturally-informed teaching lessen the obligation for society to address inequalities and place that responsibility on individual teachers. ...
This critical, integrative qualitative review explores how researchers approach, describe, and justify culturally relevant, culturally responsive, or culturally sustaining literacy instruction in prekindergarten through fifth-grade (P–5) classrooms. We reviewed 56 studies published between 1995 and 2018. We documented terms researchers use, theorists cited, methods, student outcomes, and student populations. We also analyzed how researchers talked about achievement gaps, addressed their own positionality, and determined that specific literacy instructional practices were culturally informed. We found that researchers most commonly claim to document culturally relevant or responsive instruction, in some cases conflating the terms and related theorists. Most studies were qualitative, occurred with traditionally marginalized students (usually Black or Latinx) in the United States, and involved students reading a text that researchers deem culturally informed. We make recommendations for teachers and researchers to move the field of culturally informed literacy forward.
... Scholars such as bell hooks (1994), Asa Hilliard (2003), James A. Banks (2006), Geneva Gay (2010), Gloria Ladson-Billings (2011, to name just a few, in the meanwhile had been busy coming to grips with the classroom issues in fact and in theory. Pedro often focused on the underachievement of Black American students, confirming the pronounced impact of social class on academic achievement, as did Jean Anyon (2005), William F. Tate (2012), and Rothstein (2004Rothstein ( , 2015 on the confluence social class and race and state-sponsored segregation by zip code. ...
This timely volume presents powerful stories told by Black families and students who have successfully negotiated a racially fraught, affluent, and diverse suburban school district in America, to illustrate how they have successfully overcome and strategically contested sanctioned racist practices in order to forge a path for students to achieve a high-quality education.
Drawing on rich qualitative data collected through interviews and interactions with parents and kin, students, community activists, and educators, Family Engagement in Black Students’ Academic Success chronicles how pride in Black American family history and values, students’ personal capabilities, and their often collective, pro-active challenges to systemic and personal racism shape students’ academic engagement. Familial and collective cultural wealth of the Black community emerges as a central driver in students’ successful achievement. Finally, the text puts forward key recommendations to demonstrate how incorporating the knowledge and voices of Black families in school decision making, remaining critically conscious of race and racial history in every-day actions and longer term policy, and pursuing collective strategies for social justice in education, will eliminate current opportunity gaps, and counteract the master-narrative of underachievement ever-present in America.
This volume will be of interest to students, scholars, and academics with an interest in matters of social justice, equity, and equality of opportunity in education for Black Americans. In addition, the text offers key insights for school authorities in building effective working relationships with Black American families to support the high achievement of Black students in K-12 education.
https://www.routledge.com/Family-Engagement-in-Black-Students-Academic-Success-Achievement-and/Seeberg/p/book/9780367721770
Reviews:
Returning to the research site of Shaker Heights High School and District, Vilma Seeberg inverts John Ogbu’s questions about Black underperformance to inquire into Black resilience despite formidable challenges. Armed with Critical Race Theory as their chosen lens, Seeberg and the Shaker Research and Parent Team draw our attention to Black folks’ discourses of defiance against despair and deficit orientations. Educational success for their children is precisely a form of acting Black while navigating a social system, including its schools, that does not have their best interests at heart. Family Engagement is a counter-story about education as an arc of hope for everyday people who refuse the long shadow of injustice. One can’t help rooting for them after reading the book.
Zeus Leonardo
Professor and Associate Dean of Education
University of California, Berkeley
Author of Edward Said and Education
This volume offers powerful counter narratives to prevailing deficit assumptions about Black students’ school achievement and levels of parental engagement, with nuanced stories of ways Black families used cultural funds of knowledge and demonstrated agency in actively challenging systemic racism while supporting students’ academic success. Seeberg and collaborators provide rich examples of ways Black students contested racist practices in an affluent and diverse suburban district and how community organizing for educational justice was persistent and in part successful over the long term. Blending sociology and anthropology of education in accessible and compelling ways, this book is a must read for all who are committed to building strong school-community relations with families of color and addressing persistent opportunity gaps in US educational contexts.
- Beth Blue Swadener, Professor, Justice & Social Inquiry and Social & Cultural Pedagogy, Arizona State University
... Amidst hate marches, mass shootings, blatant Asian American racism in the midst of COVID-19, immigration concentration camps, insurrections, we, educational workers, committed to justice, can easily be enveloped in oppression, hopelessness, and powerlessness. Thus, the strongest beacon of light that enlightens the bleak world is for us to join with the efforts of other educational workers such as researchers, educators, teachers, administrators, parents, students, community workers, and policy makers to cultivate radical possibilities (Anderson & Jones, 2016;Anyon, 2005;Womack, 2013) and radical imagination (Freire, 2007;Giroux, 2007;Greene, 1995;Jackson & Moody-Freeman, 2011;Olson & Worsham, 2007) that keeps "an optimism of the intellect" (Harvey, 2000, p. 6) alive while fighting against all forms of oppression. We need to educate hope that evokes "different histories and different futures" (Giroux, 2017, p. xiii) and "reinvent" radical love that we "could find the strength, faith, and humility to establish solidarity and struggle together to transform the oppressive ideologies and practices" (Darder, 2017, p. 80). ...
... Initial critiques suggested that conflict theoriesespecially those rooted in Bowles' and Gintis' correspondence principlewere too deterministic and failed to adequately account for the complex ways in which marginalized groups exercise agency through conflict (Apple, 2011;Giroux, 2001). Critical scholars advancing such critiques have sought to demonstrate the ways marginalized actors resist educational policies and practices that they experience as alienating, particularly through broader social movements (Anyon, 2014;Apple, 2013). For example, Lipman (2011) illustrates how teachers, parents, and community activists individually and collectively resisted the market-oriented policies being advocated by dominant policy actors in Chicago. ...
Conflicts over education and education policy continue, and now new, diversified actors push for change while technologies expand the terrain where conflicts unfold. Conflict theories would seem best suited to address these conflicts. However, despite conflict theories’ substantive contributions, they are infrequently used in the US context and have met with critique, viewed as too reductive to fully contend with the complexities of conflict in the educational arena. In this paper, we extend traditional conflict theories to address these longstanding critiques and to also incorporate contemporary complexities and developments. Our study is grounded in recent developments in sociological field theory and intersectionality theory. Our proposed extension of conflict theory was developed in conversation with twelve empirical cases of recent conflicts in P-16 education. This iterative project’s novel insights offer practical implications for policy actors, researchers, and policymakers.
... Social systems, like PK-12 schools, maintain cultural hegemony by applying the deviant label to undesirable behaviors and identities (Apple, 2000). Anyon (2005) argued that schools sidestep their role in transmitting heteronormative and cisnormative ideologies with appeals to function: schools are teachers of norms, not producers. However, the reproduction of the status quo in schools (e.g., Gee, 2012) is nonetheless harmful to trans and bi parents and their children. ...
Heteronormativity, family hegemony, and gender biases in K-12 education threaten child safety, parental dignity, and identity among queer families. While prior research examined the experiences of queer parents-specifically those of lesbian and gay parents-empirical attention to school-related experiences of trans and bi parents is lacking. Hence, this phenomenological study focuses on the PK-12 school-related experiences of bi and trans parents. Using queer theory as a theoretical framework, we review relevant literature on family hegemony, gender biases, and heteronormativity within school settings and its impact on children with queer families. Then, we discuss the methods and analysis used to understand the experiences of bi and trans parent participants. Analysis revealed four themes: (a) concern for the child; (b) value for diversity; (c) heteronormative nature of schools; and (d) importance of inclusivity. Finally, we provide recommendations on ways school personnel can better support trans and bi parents and their children.
... 620). Anyon (2005) concurred that community is a vital part of school reform, "thus creating some synergy between various campaigns" (p. 4). ...
... In P-20 education, discriminatory policies occur, for example, because of zoning, redlining, and admission requirements that favor the privileged (Oberti, 2007). Clearly, discriminatory policies will not go away until critically conscious educators and lawmakers review current policies and replace them where appropriate (Anyon, 2014). Findings presented in Table 1 suggest that teacher educators should be involved in this policy revision work to provide equal opportunities and resources for teacher recruitment. ...
... In accord with this latter perspective, but providing important nuances with respect to leadership and types of collaboration, are the mixed approaches such as the community development model (Sampson et al., 2002), which argue that the school is a neighborhood and the neighborhood is a school. These models are based on the premise of a strong interrelationship between neighborhood and school, and argue that improvement is achieved through the community development of these entities, but at the same time, they highlight the importance of the school as a key protagonist in such a process (Anyon, 2014;Miller et al., 2011). For this perspective, the social transformation of the neighborhood and the school arises through community development, an educational impulse of the city, and the active role of the social actors involved (e.g., schools and social organizations) along with civil society. ...
Whilst there are many advocates of the notion that a fluid school-neighborhood relationship can improve education, there are gaps in the conceptual and empirical study of school and community governance models. This article analyses how two schools and social actors in two disadvantaged neighborhoods relate, collaborate, and organize to encourage school success for all students. The results make visible the origin and organizational dynamics of the school-community alliances in each community. Partnerships, based on a bottom-linked governance system at the school and community level, are a strategic approach for working together in developing a citizenry that can address both present and future challenges.
... The linked discourses of diversity and pathology thus reluctantly reflected and reinforced racialized perceptions of school quality-perceptions that became particularly salient in the context of choice-based marketplaces and other neoliberal educational policies (Chaparro, 2021;Ewing, 2018;Turner, 2020;Wells, 2018). By doing so, they preclude transformative visions of quality education based on the redistribution of resources and other radical alternatives (Anyon, 2005;Dumas, 2009). ...
Discussions of school integration often contrast the perceived deficits of segregated schools with the perceived strengths of schools with diverse student bodies. In this study, I examine the relationships that school community members infer between student demographics and school quality in diversifying areas of New York City. I use portraits of three New Yorkers to examine the ways that school community members reluctantly re-inscribe the stigma associated with segregated schools, assuming that the best way to improve a school is to increase its diversity. These braided discourses of pathology and diversity call into question the extent to which advocacy for integration advances the goals of educational justice.
... While PDR has centered partnerships with groups that have been historically marginalized from dominant knowledge production, we consider the unique power dynamics of partnering with teachers who are multiply positioned both as a group that is excluded from official knowledge production by researchers, administrators, and policy makers and as members of a profession that also functions to further social reproduction (Anyon, 1981;Apple, 1980;Luke, 2010;Willis, 1981). Acknowledging the critical contributions and possibilities of teachers who advance educational justice and structural transformation in schooling and societal contexts (Anyon, 2005;Mirra & Morrell, 2011;Souto-Manning & Martell, 2019), we take seriously the intellectual contributions of teachers who have valuable insights as scholars, theorists, and designers. We also emphasize that teachers are simultaneously negotiating, participating in, and impacted by the neoliberal context of schooling, while also deemed solely responsible and scapegoated for educational inequities that are further exacerbated by corporate reform and market-driven teacher preparation (D'Amico Pawlewicz, 2020). ...
... The research articles in this special issue represent an important step in advancing our knowledge in this area, and this present article aims specifically at examining just how consequential opt-out activism has been from a political perspective. While the proliferation of grassroots activism in education is in itself an exciting development for those who favor robust public engagement in politics, the allure of grassroots educational activism lies not just in its dramaturgy, but in the potential changes it portends for future politics and policymaking (Anyon, 2005). In their classic book on American political participation, Verba and Nie (1972) conceptualized the study of political participation as embracing three distinct dimensions: the process of politicization (i.e., the antecedents of political participation); the participation input (i.e., who participates, how much, and through what means); and the consequences of participation. ...
Grassroots activism is on the rise in American education, leading some scholars to announce the arrival of a “New Politics of Education” in which political elites and grassroots actors clash over foundational questions of policy and power. However, little research has examined just how consequential grassroots education activism might actually be in this new era. This study takes up this area of inquiry by examining the political consequences of the opt-out movement, arguably the largest and most high-profile grassroots education movement in recent history.
... In particular, education policy across U.S. history tends to intervene with and control minoritized communities (Anyon, 2005;Hursh & Martina, 2003;Lipman, 2005;Stein, 2004), making it important to think about the phenomenon of policy-driven institution-identities from the lens of social identity as well. Looking again to the example of special education policy implementation, we see a consistent overrepresentation of minoritized students in disability categories most likely to place students in self-contained or special day classes, separating them from their peers. ...
Preface Schools exert powerful forces on people's lives. As society's formal setting for learning, schools-or, more precisely, the people in authority there-certify the learning of the next generation. Contradictions between learning and the bureaucratized systems of schooling are particularly keen in mathematics classrooms, where students are constantly subjected to tools that measure, rank, sort, and label them and their learning. The use of technical instruments as the tools of measurement gives results a veneer of scientific truth such that shifting life trajectories get both rationalized and made invisible. We refer to the mathematical identities that come from such processes as institution-identities (Gee, 2000), exploring how policy language makes available and naturalizes certain positions for students within schools. In other words, we examine how policy language and practices shape and constrain possibilities for young people's mathematical identities in school-based interactions. All four authors of this chapter taught in U.S. schools. As such, we all have been actors in processes that took full, complex human beings and sorted, labeled, and set them on different paths. In doing so, we co-constructed students' mathematical institution-identities, giving credence to (or shedding doubt on) stories about their capabilities and future possibilities. In this chapter, we use thickly described examples from four research projects to examine and illuminate how policy language and practices shape and constrain possibilities for young people's mathematical identities in school-based interactions. On the basis of this analysis, we develop a theory of how policies and neoliberal logics operate together to provide institution-identities that become consequential in children's mathematical identities and learning. We argue that mathematics educators concerned with issues of access, equity, and inclusion should attend to institution-identities rooted in neoliberal policies that naturalize processes contributing to social stratification. We furthermore demonstrate that policy and its enactment can serve as a site for research into the discursive nature of mathematical identities.
... Anyon also names the Collaborative Communications Group (CCG), a network that includes five school districts and non-profits, corporations, foundations, and federal, state, and municipal governments, with the purpose of strategic planning and organizational management. She discusses CC9 of the South Bronx, now part of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform as well as Southern Echo (Anyon, 2005). These groups and initiatives Anyon described have worked and continue to work with communities to support organizing for school improvement but are only beginning to address the corporatization of public schools furthered by Race to the Top, now the primary source of the policies they have traditionally opposed. ...
In the context of the ongoing capitalistic crisis in Greece, neoliberal memorandum and surveillance policies were imposed while a number of restructuring and institutional modifications were attempted, all of which intensified the general clash as well as the imposition of power relationships and efforts to ideologically manipulate the employees. This resulted in an impressive rise of social movements during the period of 2009-2015. In this paper, we study the social movements' influence to an informal and collective type of learning which adults acquire from them, whether as direct and active participants or as indirect ones. In particular, we study their influence on the ability to reform the comformist character of everyday consciousness in the prevailing social reality and on the formulation of a consciousness that is emancipated from the dominant ideology and aims on social change. The questioning of the memorandum policies does not entail, in a self-fullfilling way, the awakening and social emancipation of the participants from the opposed movements. However, the crisis overthrows the limits of the operational efficiency and compromise of everyday consciousness, thus raising disorienting dilemmas and conflicts that demand reconsideration. These processes create the conditions for a transformative learning, providing the opportunity for a meaningful connection with the very essence of phenomena, in order to achieve knowledge and comprehension of social reality. It is a fact that may lead to an active involvement and conscious aspiration to change this reality.
The Institute for Urban Education (IUE) began in 2005, following unitary status of Kanas City Public Schools in 2003, as a four-year undergraduate urban teacher preparation program to prepare students to interrupt school-centered practices of Eurocentric identity and antiblackness. A program feature entails recruitment of high school students from urban communities and scholarships to support fulltime preparation without employment distractions. Graduates commit to teach for a minimum of four-years in an urban school. Our investigation incorporated BlackCrit with in-depth interviews to capture the experiences of nine graduates in the schools where they teach or engage in school leadership. While testimonials from graduates indicate success of the program, our investigation underscores new pathways for Black valuing of youth and their communities.
In this theoretical paper, I examine the role and potential alterations to uses of social categories in qualitative research. Categories are socially constructed, imbued with power, and include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. These categories, although constructs and subject to change, hold durability and are leveraged in much of social science, including qualitative research. To engage with how difference within and across categories can be engaged in multiple ways, I describe a portion of longitudinal ethnographic data to raise up the question of what theories do what kinds of work with contested social categories. This excerpted transcript is not proposed as an exemplar or model. Building on Jackson and Mazzei methodology of reading with theory, I present the interaction as read with three theoretical frameworks: intersectionality intra-action , and Kawagley’s interconnectedness. I argue that this approach to social theories which upends and mingles the order of theory and data, surfaces important questions about what we ask categories to do, what they do to knowledge systems, and how categories themselves should be addressed through a studied use of theories.
This empirical study describes a youth-led participatory action research project that engaged a majority Black student population facing adverse childhood experiences, including economic inequities, within their Florida communities. In 2019, one Orange County Boys & Girls Club (B&GC) surveyed its 1,400 members to assess their overall club experience. The needs assessment indicated that club members, ages 9–12 years old, reported more challenges than other age groups relating to emotional safety, physical safety, impulse control, teamwork, and conflict resolution. The B&GC director requested university partners to collaborate with older club leaders, ages 15–19 years old, to develop a means of addressing such concerns. Project results were two-fold: (a) the development of an innovative social and emotional curriculum consisting of skill-building and digital-storytelling for younger youth members, and (b) the elevation of voices and experiences of multiply-marginalized youth to spark club transformation through intergenerational mentoring.
Few empirical studies describe the interior world of alternative school settings. We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 11 alternative school students, discussing factors that contribute to absenteeism as well as the circumstances that led them to enroll in an alternative setting. We find that students’ regular attendance is facilitated by (1) stable housing, (2) a means of transportation to school, (3) feelings of belonging, and (4) flexible supports from staff. Given that two of these pertain to matters beyond the school, we argue for an “expanded accountability,” in which the language of “accountability” is broadened to encompass non-educational policymaking.
Teachers working in schools run by city corporations in mega cities like Bengaluru primarily cater for children living in slums, which have the highest concentrations of poverty, socially disadvantaged groups, and children of migrant workers. Teachers are neither professionally prepared nor given support to meet the needs of these children, who are educationally at risk. While the systemic issues afflicting the education of the urban poor require critical attention, research in the sector highlights the importance of inclusive pedagogic practices in classrooms. This paper examines the possibilities and challenges of changing pedagogic practices to be more inclusive in the context of a professional development programme for teachers 1 that was adopted over a period of three years at four schools run by Bengaluru City Corporation.
Many of us have multiple stories that would be appropriate to tell given the theme of this Special Issue. I am compelled to tell a story about my work with teachers, teacher leaders, and other allies on the Navajo Nation. The Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators (DINÉ) was started by teacher leaders who envisioned a collaborative professional development institute specifically for K12 teachers on the Navajo Nation. In their rural, Indigenous-serving schools, teachers are often asked to deliver scripted curriculum that is decontextualized, dehistoricized, and therefore, dehumanizing for their students, themselves, and their communities. Their vision for the DINÉ was developed and honed over many years in response to this context. In this essay, I will briefly describe the DINÉ, how and why it began, and its current status. I will focus on three critical spaces that have opened up in and through the DINÉ: teacher leadership, connection/relationality, and activism/self-determination. In reflecting on these three spaces, I suggest that our work in the DINÉ is fundamentally about Native Nation building.
Within the literature, action research (AR) has been described as a method and a dispositional approach. This overview of the attributes of AR takes the position that AR is a dispositional approach to research methods that has desirable methods associated with it. This presentation to doctoral students at East Stroudburg University of Pennsylvania examined the foundations of AR, the dispositional attributes of AR, the positionality of the researcher within AR, and why AR my be an innovators approach to systems change in education.
This article offers a framework for analyzing social movement participation in public education through a focus on universities in Brazil. It builds on the literature on social movement–state relations, participatory governance, and community organizing in schools, drawing on the case of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the National Program for Education in Areas of Agrarian Reform (PRONERA) to illustrate the need to recenter the idea of conflict as a central and ongoing process of social movement participation in public schools and universities. The article also introduces the concept of prefiguration and highlights how students can prefigure in the formal public school system the types of social and economic practices they hope to build in the future. Contentious cogovernance and prefiguration are tools not only for improving educational equity but also for increasing the strength and internal capacity of social movements, paralleling the role Paulo Freire envisioned for nonformal popular education within grassroots organizations.
In connection with the historical legacy and imaginations of youth of Color advocating for more just and equitable futures, I consider the complex political terrain through which teachers of Color cultivate students’ agency for social change within the narrow confines of schooling institutions. In this article, I conceptualize racial micropolitical literacy to analyze how teachers identify context-specific reproductions of whiteness and interlocking systems of oppression while learning to politically confront, navigate, and transform race and power through daily, embodied, and interactional practices. Through video recordings, ethnographic field notes, and interview data, I apply this framework to document the day-to-day practices of an Asian American teacher co-constructing student transformational resistance within a southeast Los Angeles, California public middle school. My analysis reveals that the teacher: (1) used critical artifacts to reconstruct carceral conditions of schooling into communal learning spaces of solidarity and activism, (2) engaged students in everyday dialogue about racism, power, and just possibilities, and (3) subverted scripted curricula by drawing on students and his own counternarratives as resources for sociopolitical learning. These practices were improvisationally leveraged on the day of a US national student-led walkout to expand multiple opportunities for politically marginalized Latinx students to organize collective action against gun violence. Offering a more intergenerational and intersectional lens of resistance and social change, I provide implications for eradicating oppressive schooling conditions that constrain the potential of students and teachers of Color as movement-makers and civic leaders in daily classroom life.
Contrary to popular opinion, the vast majority of complaints about the poor quality of school graduates who enter the workforce are not about a lack of academic skills but instead focus on deficiencies of appropriate work attitudes and behaviors. In fact, attitudes and behaviors have a significant impact on workforce quality and can be developed both in schools and on the job.
We investigated changes in skill requirements and the effects of these changes on Black men's access to entry-level jobs, using open-ended interviews of managers at 56 firms in four industries. Managers reported that due to heightened competitive pressure, “soft skills”—particularly motivation and ability to interact well with customers and coworkers—are becoming increasingly important. Many managers view Black men as lacking in these soft skills. This helps to explain Black men's growing disadvantage in labor markets.
In this article, we examine differences across three racial/ethnic groups in (a) the psychometric properties of the Early Childhood HOME Inventory and the HOME-Short Form and (b) the prediction of the two versions of the HOME Inventory to cognitive and behavioral outcomes among preschool children. Data are taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-Child Supplement (NLSY-CS) and the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) sample. Findings suggest few racial/ethnic differences in the psychometric properties of either version of the HOME scale. Both show better prediction of cognitive child outcomes for all three racial/ethnic groups. Both show better prediction of child outcomes generally for European American than for Hispanic and African American families. Findings suggest that although certain aspects of parenting are common, these dimensions of parenting are not equally important in explaining child outcomes for different racial/ethnic subgroups.
This article argues that central cities and their surrounding regions are highly interdependent, and that neither suburbs nor central cities are self-sufficient. For example, suburban per capita income is linked to central city per capital income, and the price of peripheral "edge city" office space is linked to the price of office space in the central business district. Not only do many suburbanites earn their incomes in central cities, but the authors also find that the amounts of income generated in core cities continue to grow. Overall, strong statistical evidence shows that suburbs benefit when their core cities are viable (densely populated and prosperous) and that when cities include a greater proportion of their metropolitan populations, they tend to be more prosperous.
Two significant trends have occurred in urban areas across the United States during the last decade: immigration and the decentralization of employment. While each trend has been investigated by research, the magnitude of spatial imbalance between immigrant settlement patterns and employment location has received much less attention. Using a sample of the 60 largest immigrant metropolitan areas, this study uses a Spatial Mismatch Index (Martin, 2001) and regression methods to address this question over the period 1980 - 2000. Results indicate immigrants are more spatially mismatched with job opportunities than the white population. We find that jobs are moving towards where the native-born whites concentrate, and away from immigrants. However, immigrants tend to follow jobs at such a rate that their residential mobility was able to offset the otherwise enlarging spatial disparity. Regression models indicate that immigrants move to locations that have high shares of employment, and that business tend to locate near the white population.
Educational failure is one of the costliest and most visible problems associated with ghetto poverty. We explore whether housing assistance that helps low‐income families move to better neighborhoods can also improve access to good schools. Research on the Gautreaux housing desegregation program indicated significant, long‐term educational benefits, yet results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment showed no measurable impacts on school outcomes for the experimental group. We use interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to explore this puzzle.Most MTO families did not relocate to communities with substantially better schools, and those who did often moved again after a few years. Where parents had meaningful school choices, these were typically driven by poor information obtained from insular social networks or by cultural logic centered on avoiding ghetto‐type school insecurity and disorder, not garnering academic opportunity. Those factors may not shift if poor families with less educated parents are served by a relocation‐only strategy.
This study explores social class and racial differences in parents' school involvement. Furthermore, it examines involved parents' intentions concerning school. Data are from a yearlong observation of parent-educator relations at a suburban school district in the northeastern United States. Highly involved parents tended to be White, upper-middle-class mothers. This happened, in part, because involved mothers frequently acted in ways that excluded other mothers, particularly African Americans. Involved mothers pressed administrators for additional tracking. This was a strategy for separating their children from lower status children and positioning their children for higher education. We discuss implications for school policy.
Social movements seeking to change the subordinate status of ethnic minorities have drawn activists from both the minority and dominant groups. Conflict has at times developed between movement members of these two groups. In a comparative analysis of three movements—the civil rights movement, the anti-slavery cause in the U.S., and the movement to abolish Untouchability in India—the sources of tension appear quite similar. Ideologically, minority group activists viewed themselves as more radical and committed to that particular cause than did their dominant group co-workers and were more for a strategy of minority group self-help. Organizational conflict arose as majority members disproportionately assumed decision-making positions in the movement. A third source of tension developed because some movement members were carriers of prejudices and hostilities of the larger social milieu. Outsiders frequently played essential roles in the early phases of these movements, but pressures developed on majority members to reduce involvement or withdraw altogether.
Two interlocking claims are being increasing made around school finance: that states have largely met their obligations to resolve disparities between local public school districts and that the bulk of remaining disparities are those that persist within school districts. These local decisions are described as irrational and unfair school district practices in the allocation of resources between individual district schools. In this article, we accept the basic contention of within-district inequities. But we begin with a critique of the empirical basis for the claims that within-district disparities are the dominant form of persistent disparities in school finance, finding that claims to this effect are largely based on one or a handful of deeply flawed analyses. Next, we present empirical analysis, using national data, of 16-year trends (1990 to 2005) and recent patterns (2005 to 2007) of between-district disparities, finding that state efforts to resolve between-district disparities are generally incomplete and inadequate and that in some states, between-district disparities have actually increased over time.
In Streetwise for Book Smarts, Celina Su examines the efforts of parents and students who sought to improve the quality of education in their local schools by working with grassroots organizations and taking matters into their own hands. In these organizations, everyday citizens pursued not only education reform but also democratic accountability and community empowerment. These groups had similar resources and operated in the same political context, yet their strategies and tactics were very different: while some focused on increasing state and city aid to their schools, others tried to change the way the schools themselves operated. Some coalitions sought accommodation with administrators and legislators; others did not. The events Su describes began with a series of stabbings in Bronx high schools during the 2003-2004 school year. After this rash of violence, several grassroots groups cited the need for additional safety patrols. Mothers from one school spoke of how they had previously protested until they got extra officers, a fairly scarce resource in New York public schools, at their local elementary school. Others asserted that not all the safety patrol officers already in place were treating students humanely. Parent organizations and school officials battled over who was to blame for the school violence. Did a police presence solve the problem, or did it exacerbate the schools' violence-prone conditions? Members of different groups proposed and mobilized behind a range of remedies. These divergent responses shed light on the ways in which the choices made by each organization mattered. By learning from Su's close observation of four activist groups in the Bronx, including Mothers on the Move and Sistas and Brothas United, we can better understand strategies that may ultimately lead to better and safer schools everywhere and help to revitalize American democracy.
'Editor Wolff is a leading authority on income, wealth, and inequality in the US, and contributing authors are well-respected experts in their field. Overall, the research is high quality, and most papers include a substantial list of references. A plethora of data is considered, and much statistical evidence is presented. . . . A useful contribution to the literature on income distribution and wealth inequality. Recommended.' - E. Kacapyr, Choice.
Throughout the history of the African American people there has been no stronger resource for overcoming adversity than the black church. From its role in leading a group of free Blacks to form a colony in Sierra Leone in the 1790s to helping ex-slaves after the Civil War, and from playing major roles in the Civil Rights Movement to offering community outreach programs in American cities today, black churches have been the focal point of social change in their communities. Based on extensive research over several years, this book is the first comprehensive account of how black churches have helped shape American society. The author surveys nearly a thousand black churches across the country, including its oldest, the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia. These black churches, whose roots extend back to antebellum times, have periodically confronted social, economic, and political problems facing the African American community. This book addresses such questions as: How widespread and effective is the community activity of black churches? What are the patterns of activities being undertaken today? How do activist churches confront such problems as family instability, youth development, AIDS and other health issues, and care for the elderly? With profiles of the remarkable black heroes and heroines who helped create the activist church, and a compelling agenda for expanding the black church's role in society at large, this book is an inspirational, visionary, and definitive account of the subject. © 1999 by Andrew Billingsley and the University of Maryland. All rights reserved.
Political conservatives have long believed that the best government is a small government. But if this were true, noted economist Jeff Madrick argues, the nation would not be experiencing stagnant wages, rising health care costs, increasing unemployment, and concentrations of wealth for a narrow elite. In this perceptive and eye-opening book, Madrick proves that an engaged government--a big government of high taxes and wise regulations--is necessary for the social and economic answers that Americans desperately need in changing times. He shows that the big governments of past eras fostered greatness and prosperity, while weak, laissez-faire governments marked periods of corruption and exploitation.The Case for Big Governmentconsiders whether the government can adjust its current policies and set the country right.Madrick explains why politics and economics should go hand in hand; why America benefits when the government actively nourishes economic growth; and why America must reject free market orthodoxy and adopt ambitious government-centered programs. He looks critically at today's politicians--at Republicans seeking to revive nineteenth-century principles, and at Democrats who are abandoning the pioneering efforts of the Great Society. Madrick paints a devastating portrait of the nation's declining social opportunities and how the economy has failed its workers. He looks critically at today's politicians and demonstrates that the government must correct itself to address these serious issues.A practical call to arms,The Case for Big Governmentasks for innovation, experimentation, and a willingness to fail. The book sets aside ideology and proposes bold steps to ensure the nation's vitality.
Drawing on an assessment of reform efforts in one school in an urban ghetto in a large district in the Northeast, this article describes processes and events that illustrate how social manifestations of racial and social class status can combine to vitiate efforts at school reform. I argue that three factors—sociocultural differences among participants in reform, an abusive school environment, and educator expectations of failed reform—occurring in a minority ghetto where the school population is racially and economically isolated constitute some of the powerful and devastating ways that concomitants of race and social class can intervene to determine what happens in inner-city schools, and in attempts to improve them.
Using new measures of job skills and standard measures of education and earnings, the authors examine the effects of changing occupational and industry employment patterns on the skill composition of work between 1960 and 1985. The results show a strong upgrading of cognitive and interactive skills—combined, however, with a substantial slowdown in the rates of growth of those skills—and a declining demand for motor skills. The earnings mix of jobs did not show the same high correlation with employment growth as skill and education levels, because high-wage, low-skill jobs declined in the goods industries while low-wage jobs requiring at least moderate skill levels grew rapidly in the services.
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In this article, Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna examine the political struggles associated with detracking reform. Drawing on their three-year study of ten racially and socioeconomically mixed schools that are implementing detracking reform, the authors take us beyond, the school walls to better understand the broad social forces that influence detracking reform. They focus specifically on the role of elite parents and how their political and cultural capital enables them to influence and resist efforts to dismantle or lessen tracking in their children's schools. Wells and Serna identify four strategies employed by elite parents to undermine and co-opt reform initiatives designed to alter existing tracking structures. By framing elite parents' actions within the literature on elites and cultural capital, the authors provide a deeper understanding of the barriers educators face in their efforts to detrack schools.
The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements is a compilation of original, state-of-the-art essays by internationally recognized scholars on an array of topics in the field of social movement studies. Contains original, state-of-the-art essays by internationally recognized scholars. Covers a wide array of topics in the field of social movement studies. Features a valuable introduction by the editors which maps the field, and helps situate the study of social movements within other disciplines. Includes coverage of historical, political, and cultural contexts; leadership; organizational dynamics; social networks and participation; consequences and outcomes; and case studies of major social movements. Offers the most comprehensive discussion of social movements available.
This article relies on a national survey of community‐based housing development organizations to profile production levels, spatial coverage, funding sources, and nondevelopmental roles of the nonprofit housing development sector. It also uses Urban Institute case study results and secondary data sources to examine continuing barriers to increased production in the sector and the evolution of institutional responses to those barriers.
Anyon uses her personal history as a contributor to the resurgence of progressive scholarship in the late 1970s and early 1980s to critique recent work in education. She argues that Marxist thought has failed to develop and has been largely abandoned by critical scholars, many of whom now seek empowerment for teachers and students through postmodern and poststructural ideas. She undertakes an analysis of these new theories, and of their instantiation in educational scholarship that claims to use them to foster empowerment and change. Anyon assesses the political possibilities and consequences of these theories and the practices they entail. The goal of the analysis is to identify theory that will be useful in struggles for a more equitable society.
With the benefit of hindsight, few now doubt that the housing bubble that induced most of the recent growth of the U.S. economy was bound to burst or that a general financial crisis and a global economic slowdown were to be the unavoidable results. Warning signs were evident for years to all of those not taken in by the new financial alchemy of high-risk debt management, and not blinded, as was much of the corporate world, by huge speculative profits. This can be seen in a series of articles that appeared in this space: "The Household Debt Bubble" (May 2006), "The Explosion of Debt and Speculation" (November 2006), "Monopoly-Finance Capital" (December 2006), and "The Financializ-ation of Capitalism" (April 2007). In the last of these we wrote... This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.
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Changes in capitalism over the last three decades have been commonly characterized using a trio of terms: neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. Although a lot has been written on the first two of these, much less attention has been given to the third.* Yet, financialization is now increasingly seen as the dominant force in this triad. The financialization of capitalism-the shift in gravity of economic activity from production (and even from much of the growing service sector) to finance—is thus one of the key issues of our time. More than any other phenomenon it raises the question: has capitalism entered a new stage? This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.
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U rban sprawl is consuming land at almost three times the rate of population growth. On the threshold of the twenty-first century, the rate of outward expansion of low-density development is outstripping the ability of even the most annexa-tion-minded central cities to keep pace. The leadership of almost all central cities (whether locked in like Cleveland or expansionist like Charlotte) faces a common challenge: defending their city's viability by controlling sprawl through regional growth management. Regional growth management must also be a key target of the social justice movement in America. While barriers based purely on race are slowly coming down, barriers based on income are steadily rising in most metropolitan areas. Sprawling regional development patterns are closing off avenues of advancement for low-income minorities. Sprawl is leading to (1) greater dispersion of jobs, placing low-skilled jobs beyond the reach of many low-skilled potential work-ers; (2) growing fiscal disparities, which impair the quality of services in inner cities and older suburbs; and (3) greater concentrations of poverty, which have devastating impacts on the education of inner-city children. Strong regional growth management practices, by themselves, will not be instant solutions for all these problems. Growth management 78 is the essential framework within which access to low-skilled jobs can improve, fiscal equity can be achieved, and greater economic integra-tion can be promoted. The political coalitions necessary to secure, through state legislatures, effective regional growth management will also be the source of support for other policies (such as regional tax-base sharing or fair-share affordable housing) that can achieve greater social equity.
Problem: Employment is an underemphasized component of sprawl. A measure of job sprawl that accounts for the proximity of employment to populated places is needed to grasp problems of sprawl (especially those related to mobility) and mitigate their impacts. Prior sprawl studies have not investigated the proximity of jobs and populated places in ways that are replicable and meaningful to practitioners.Purpose: We seek to elevate the importance of employment generally and the proximity of jobs to populated places more specifically, in the sprawl debate. For 358 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States, we investigate how spatial patterns of job locations have changed from 2001 to 2006 in relation to preexisting (year 2000) populated places. We present results nationally and investigate whether urban containment regions (mostly in the west) and residentially sprawled metro areas in southern states performed better or worse than the mean for all MSAs with regard to the job sprawl metric.Methods: Using a GIS, we developed and applied a job sprawl metric that measured employment change over time (2001–2006) in relation to populated places in 2000, within and adjacent to 358 U.S. metropolitan areas. Job sprawl was defined as the percentage of change in job proximity (or straight-line distance, as a proxy for accessibility) to populated places over time.Results and conclusions: Of 358 metropolitan regions, 227 (63%) experienced job gain and a decrease in job accessibility, confirming the stereotypical pattern of job sprawl in growing regions. None of the nine selected urban containment regions increased proximity of jobs to populated places from 2001 to 2006 (i.e., they still exhibited job sprawl). Mixed results were observed for 11 regions characterized as having low-density residential sprawl as of 2000.Takeaway for practice: Measuring job sprawl as decreasing accessibility among jobs and populated places over time gives practitioners a better understanding of the resulting spatial and functional relationships among land uses in the region. Urban containment alone appears to be insufficient to avoid mobility-related problems. Sprawl studies must be made more relevant to practice.
This paper examines whether housing vouchers help poor people improve their education and employment. The Gautreaux program uses housing certificates and counseling to help poor people move to white suburbs and to black urban areas. The people who move to suburbs face different opportunities and challenges than those moving within the city, so it is not certain which group will have better employment and education. We find that compared with city movers, the adult suburban movers have greatly improved employment, even after controls, but they have no different pay or hours worked. Among children, suburban movers are more likely than city movers to be (1) in school, (2) in college‐track programs, (3) in four‐year colleges, (4) in jobs, (5) in better‐paying jobs, and (6) in jobs with benefits. Just by moving people and without providing additional services, this program has uncovered capabilities of these low‐income people that were not evident in the city. Policy implications of this program are considered herein.
By enabling low-income families to move from high- to low-poverty neighbourhoods, tenant-based rental subsidies for poor families have the potential to reduce the degree of economic segregation in the US. This paper provides a framework for identifying the benefits and costs of such housing mobility programmes, and reviews the available empirical evidence on the net effects of quasi- or formal randomised housing mobility experiments. The best available evidence suggests that families in public housing who receive rental subsidies to move from high- to lower-poverty areas may experience reductions in welfare receipt and improvements in health status. Such moves may also improve schooling outcomes for children and reduce their problem behaviours. The benefits to society from these changes are substantial when measured in dollar terms. Unfortunately, very little is currently known about the effects of housing-mobility efforts on non-participants.
t the end of the twentieth century, the question of how to govern and plan for the future of America's sprawling metropolitan regions has become the subject of urgent and con- tentious debate. It is now widely recognized that the nation's metro- politan regions are its basic economic units. The largest of these places are incubators of new technologies and industries and centers of American culture, communications, and media. They are the cru- cibles in which the new American society of the early twenty-first cen- tury will be formed from the swelling ranks of immigrants and native- born Americans who live in them. But across the country, rapidly deconcentrating metropolitan regions have expanded beyond arbitrary and fixed political borders established decades or centuries ago. The results are racial, economic, and social divisions; increasing traffic congestion; inequities in infra- structure and school finance; adverse environmental effects; and other concerns that are causing citizens and business and political leaders to question how metropolitan regions are governed. Metro- politan governance systems established in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries clearly are not up to the challenges that will con- front America's twenty-first-century metropolitan regions. A number of regional governance experts have called for the cre- ation of powerful new metropolitan governments or regional service
Youth development programs are gaining prominence as a way to help adolescents become competent, engaged, and responsible adults. However, the definition of youth development programs is elusive. Most simply, youth development programs are programs that provide opportunities and support to help youth gain the competencies and knowledge they need to meet the increasing challenges they will face as they mature. Typically, they are community based, rather than school based. In this article, we evaluate the usefulness of the youth development framework based on 15 program evaluations. The results of the evaluations are discussed and 3 general themes emerge. First, programs incorporating more elements of the youth development framework seem to show more positive outcomes. Second, the evaluations support the importance of a caring adult-adolescent relationship, although these relationships need not be limited to 1-on-1 mentoring. And 3rd, longer-term programs that engage youth throughout adolescence appear to be the most effective. The policy and programmatic implications of these findings are discussed.
activists, and academics for the first Greater Kansas City "Going Global" conference, designed for "partners and players in the region's international future." The region referred to spanned the borders of Missouri and Kansas. The conference unveiled for discussion regional economic development plans, a neighborhood improvement and transportation initiative, and "The World Comes to Kansas City," a briefing about tourism and trade promotion efforts. Participants heard success stories about regional cooperation and international strategies from the Research Triangle in North Carolina, the Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle, and the European Union. The event concluded with a family-oriented "ethnic enrichment" festi- val for the general public. Ranging from broad global issues to the most local of concerns, regional consciousness-raising events like this are increasingly com- mon throughout the United States and in other countries. They are a response to a widespread perception that strong communities in the global economy must have a regional focus—that neighboring cities and towns must join forces to present a unified image to the rest of the world. They can promote the region, secure its economic future,
Black-white residential segregation, while on the decline, still persists at high levels in most US metropolitan areas. Despite decades of research into the underlying causes of black-white residential segregation, there is still much disagreement among scholars over the root causes of this phenomenon. This article examines recent evidence on the causes of black-white residential segregation. Evidence on the following hypotheses is examined: racial income differences, racial differences in tastes for housing services, racial differences in housing market information, racial prejudice, and housing market discrimination. Recent evidence suggests that household-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics explain only a small proportion of the racial differences in location choices. Racial processes such as prejudice and housing market discrimination continue to drive black-white segregation patterns.
In this study we draw on data from a quasi-experimental study to test whether moving into an affordable housing project in an affluent suburb yields educational benefits to the children of project residents, compared to the educations they would have received had they not moved into the project. Results suggest that resident children experienced a substantial improvement in school quality compared with an otherwise similar control group of students whose parents also had self-selected into the pool of people eligible for project residence. Parents who were project residents also displayed higher levels of school involvement compared with the control group of non-resident parents, and their children were exposed to significantly lower levels of school disorder and violence within school and spent more time reading outside of school. Although parental involvement in education did not affect students’ grade performance and project residence did not significantly influence GPA directly, the reduced exposure to disorder and violence and more time spent reading did raise the grades earned by project residents significantly, indicating that the educational improvements were achieved indirectly through these intervening variables.
Racial profiling has emerged as a highly contentious practice in a range of social settings. This article examines the role of racial profiling in the property insurance industry and how such practices, grounded in negative racial stereotyping, have contributed to racial segregation and uneven metropolitan development. From a review of industry underwriting and marketing materials, court documents, and research by government agencies, industry and community groups, and academics, it is clear that race has long affected and continues to affect the policies and practices of this industry. Due to limitations in publicly available data, it is difficult to assess precisely the extent to which race shapes industry practices. Research and public policy initiatives are explored that can ameliorate the data problems, increase access to insurance, and foster more equitable community development.
This paper examines the legitimacy of concerns of local residents about the adverse fiscal impacts of population growth. The conceptual discussion shows that economic theory provides no clear prediction of the impact of population growth on per capita spending. Based on a national data set of large countries, simple d descriptive analysis indicates that greater population growth is associated with higher per capita current spending and interest outlays. More detailed analysis both of 1978–1985 changes and of 1985 levels of current spending indicates that higher growth-related per capita spending primarily reflects the combined effects of greater density and increased local spending shares. In sum, established residents in fast- growing areas may experience declines in service quality as well as rising local tax burdens.
We assess the impact of the New Hope Project, an antipoverty program tested in a random assignment experimental design, on family functioning and developmental outcomes for preschool- and school-aged children (N = 913). New Hope offered wage supplements sufficient to raise family income above the poverty threshold and subsidies for child care and health insurance to adults who worked full-time. New Hope had strong positive effects on boys' academic achievement, classroom behavior skills, positive social behavior, and problem behaviors, as reported by teachers, and on boys' own expectations for advanced education and occupational aspirations. There were not corresponding program effects for girls. The child outcomes may have resulted from a combination of the following: Children in New Hope families spent more time in formal child care programs and other structured activities away from home than did children in control families. New Hope parents were employed more, had more material resources, reported more social support, and expressed less stress and more optimism about achieving their goals than did parents in the control sample. The results suggest that an anti-poverty program that provides support for combining work and family responsibilities can have beneficial effects on the development of school-age children.
In this paper I examine the relationship between city and suburbangrowth over the last three decades for a sample of U.S. metropolitan areas. I develop a structuralempirical model relating city income growth to suburban growth in income, population, andhouse values. The model allows for bidirectional effects of cities on suburbs and suburbs oncities, as well as for unobserved factors affecting both city and suburbs. The simultaneous,latent-variable model is identified using a combination of exclusion and covariance restrictions.Instrumental estimation results indicate that income growth in large cities enhances suburbangrowth; but income growth in small cities has little effect.
This paper focuses on three questions: (1) Was mobility within the income distribution in the 1980s different from the 1970s? (2) Is there as much mobility when some measure of permanent income is used? and (3) Does movement within the income distribution imply real income changes? Income mobility between 1969 and 1976, and between 1979 and 1986 is examined using real family income from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The results show that there is considerable movement within the income distribution when both annual and permanent income are used. This movement, however, is generally not very great in either direction. Copyright 1993 by The International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.