The concept of school engagement has attracted increasing attention as representing a possible antidote to declining academic motivation and achievement. Engagement is presumed to be malleable, responsive to contextual features, and amenable to environmental change. Researchers describe behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement and recommend studying engagement as a multifaceted construct. This article reviews definitions, measures, precursors, and outcomes of engagement; discusses limitations in the existing research; and suggests improvements. The authors conclude that, although much has been learned, the potential contribution of the concept of school engagement to research on student experience has yet to be realized. They call for richer characterizations of how students behave, feel, and think—research that could aid in the development of finely tuned interventions

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3516061.pdf

School Engagement: Potential of the Concept, State of the Evidence

In the midst of discussions about improving education, teacher education, equity, and diversity, little has been done to make pedagogy a central area of investigation. This article attempts to challenge notions about the intersection of culture and teaching that rely solely on microanalytic or macroanalytic perspectives. Rather, the article attempts to build on the work done in both of these areas and proposes a culturally relevant theory of education. By raising questions about the location of the researcher in pedagogical research, the article attempts to explicate the theoretical framework of the author in the nexus of collaborative and reflexive research. The pedagogical practices of eight exemplary teachers of African-American students serve as the investigative “site.” Their practices and reflections on those practices provide a way to define and recognize culturally relevant pedagogy.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1163320.pdf

Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

The achievement gap is one of the most talked-about issues in U.S. education. The term refers to the disparities in standardized test scores between Black and White, Latina/o and White, and recent immigrant and White students. This article argues that a focus on the gap is misplaced. Instead, we need to look at the “education debt” that has accumulated over time. This debt comprises historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral components. The author draws an analogy with the concept of national debt—which she contrasts with that of a national budget deficit—to argue the significance of the education debt.

From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools

Multicultural Education: Historical Development, Dimensions, and Practice

Sonia Nieto makes student learning the primary objective of multicultural education. She draws on a host of research in learning styles, multiple intelligences and cognitive theories to portray the way students learn. Nieto then takes the reader beyond individual learners to discuss the social context of learning, educational equity, the influence of culture on learning and critical pedagogy. Centering on multicultural education as a transformative process, the text includes many reflections of teachers who have undergone this process and whose experiences will be invaluable to other teachers.

The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities

James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires. |James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters.

The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935

The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935.

This article examines the origins and development of citizenship and equal rights by the Reconstruction Congress (1865–1875) to determine if it created a new constitutional order that is color blind and thus prohibits the use of racial classifications by government to achieve school desegregation and affirmative action programs. The theory of color-blind constitutionalism, although pursued relentlessly by a small cadre of radical Republicans, stood in marked contrast to the views of the moderate-conservative majority, a group virtually obsessed with the ways in which race affected fundamental questions of citizenship, civil equality, and political power. Only through a multiethnic history can we comprehend the variegated and profound ways in which racial ideology shaped the beliefs and behavior of the Reconstruction Congress and the ways in which Congress carefully crafted the meaning and intent of citizenship and equality in the new constitutional order, one that serves as the legal foundation for contem...

/pdf/race-conscious-educational-policies-versus-a-color-blind-4u7r4zxqx2.pdf

Race-Conscious Educational Policies Versus a “Color-Blind Constitution”: A Historical Perspective

This address concerns the initial integration of African American scholars into the American academy It traces an interesting and unusual national campaign that first opened the doors of northern white universities to African American scholars The primary focus is on what this campaign reveals about the interrelationship of race and meritocracy in mainstream American higher education during the immediate post-World War II period It is also a story about a select pool of highly qualified African American scholars and their opportunities for employment at northern white universities Finally, this is also a history of a particular process of institutional racism One underlying purpose is to explore the usefulness of the social science concept of institutional racism for framing and explaining the formation and development of specific types of racial exclusion or discrimination in educational systems that operate with explicitly race-neutral or “color-blind” laws, procedures, and policies

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/368340.pdf

Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy during the Immediate Post-World War II Era.

DURING THE FIRST two decades of the twentieth century an educational awakening stirred the American South. Stimulated by Northern philanthropists and their Southern agents, the region experienced a remarkable expansion of its public educational system. In many states laws were changed to strengthen the constitutional basis of public education. The value of schoolhouses increased, illiteracy rapidly decreased, local taxes multiplied, school terms were extended, and teachers' salaries increased considerably. Historians generally view this organized school campaign as the official launching of the Southern education movement. To be sure, white missionaries and black leaders had campaigned for universal education in the South since the Reconstruction era, but in the dawn of the twentieth century white Southerners made their first vigorous, largescale efforts to improve the region's schools. The success of the Southern education movement was a result of the combined efforts of industrial philanthropists and Southern white educators. These two groups formed a powerful new force in the struggle to determine the purpose of Southern education for both whites and blacks. The alliance between Northern businessmen-philanthropists and Southern white school officials was ratified by the creation of two major educational organizations, the

James D. Anderson

Papers

The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935

The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935.

Race-Conscious Educational Policies Versus a “Color-Blind Constitution”: A Historical Perspective

Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy during the Immediate Post-World War II Era.

Northern Foundations and the Shaping of Southern Black Rural Education, 1902–1935