A guide to disrupting harmful mindsets and practices in our schools so that students can thrive where they are. In many schools and districts, students of color living in low-income communities are told in simple and covert ways every day that they must leave their communities if they want to be successful. The message may be well-intentioned, but the leave to succeed (L2S) mindset is a dangerous narrative that affects students' sense of self. Instead, Nancy Gutiérrez and Roberto Padilla turn the L2S mindset on its head to interrogate how school and district leaders can nurture and support students to find success in their own communities.

Conchas utilizes a critical lens to examine the intersectional identities of racially minoritized students, the role of existing power hierarchies within schools, and offers specific structural approaches that create educational opportunity. This book amplifies student voice; explores school, family, and community partnerships; promotes culturally relevant pedagogy and teacher preparation; includes a new chapter on Black male optimism after the historic election of President Barack Obama; and offers a thought-provoking additional chapter on the role of educational leaders in promoting successful school pathways; plus it contains a thoroughly revised quantitative chapter on social capital. With a sense of urgency, readers will gain vital insights for understanding what is needed to create, promote, and expand equitable school environments and transformative pathways for racially minoritized urban youth.

In this collection, local experts use personal narratives and empirical data to explore the history of Mexican American and Puerto Rican education in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The essays focus on three themes: the historical context of segregated and inferior schooling for Latina/o/x students; the changing purposes and meanings of education for Latina/o/x students from the 1950s through today; and Latina/o/x resistance to educational reforms grounded in neoliberalism.

The disturbing truth: school suspension does more than impede Black students' academic achievement--it also impacts their parents' employment and can violate state and federal laws. Decades of urban disinvestment and poverty have made educational attainment for Black youth more vital than at any time in recent history.

Historically, racialized sexism in U.S. schools has manifested uniquely for Black girl-identified adolescents (including cisgender, queer, and transgender youth). These learners face heightened exposure to malicious discourses and exclusionary disciplinary policies. Engendering #BlackGirlJoy identifies the teaching practices that equip young Black women to locate, analyze, heal from, and ultimately thrive through the suffering they face inside and outside of schools.

Bridging a gap in the literature by offering a comprehensive look at how STEM teacher education programs evolve over time, this book explores teachHOUSTON, a designer teacher education program created to respond to the lack of adequately prepared STEM teachers in Houston and the emerging urban school districts that surround it.

This book examines the consequences of educational segregation from the perspective of social cohesion. It investigates the impact of separating students along socioeconomic lines on student attitudes, dispositions and outlooks considered important for social cohesion as well as on achievement, opening the discussion about the social costs of school segregation. The separation of students based on their social background is a common feature of schooling in many modern systems. This is not only due to the influence of residential segregation but also to the effects of policies promoting educational privatisation, parental choice and student academic selection. By recognising the importance of schooling for citizenship and social integration, the chapters in this book explore how the separation of students throughout their school lives can contribute to the division of citizens beyond school, and how social segregation in school systems affect social cohesion more broadly.

In Challenging the One Best System, a team of leading education scholars offers a rich comparative analysis of the set of urban education governance reforms collectively known as the "portfolio management model." They investigate the degree to which this model--a system of schools operating under different types of governance and with different degrees of autonomy--challenges the standard structure of district governance famously characterized by David Tyack as "the one best system."

Over a decade ago, the first edition of City Schools and the American Dream debuted just as reformers were gearing up to make sweeping changes in urban education. Despite the rhetoric and many reform initiatives, urban schools continue to struggle under the weight of serious challenges. What went wrong and is there hope for future change? More than a new edition, this sequel to the original bestseller has been substantially revised to include insights from new research, recent demographic trends, and emerging political realities.

Dismantled is an accessible, critical look at the devolution of local power in the Detroit public school system. The author examines the rise of charter schools and other private enterprises, the eclipse of control from local actors to new players and influences, and the invaluable lessons the experience holds for urban school systems nationwide.

Hip-Hop and Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline was created for K-12 students in hopes that they find tangible strategies for creating affirming communities where students, parents, advocates and community members collaborate to compose liberating and just frameworks that effectively define the school-to-prison pipeline and identify the nefarious ways it adversely affects their lives.