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In an era of heightened anti-Black racism and aspirations of equity in education, equity directors are at the vanguard of district efforts to eradicate educational injustices. This study examined how the racialized and gendered organizational contexts of U.S. equity directors shaped their equity leadership to transform educational systems. Drawing on intersectionality with theory about racialized organizations, we found that equity directors who identified as Black and other women of color experienced “organizational double jeopardy” in the form of diminished agency, unequal resources, differential return to their academic credentials, and decoupled formal rules from practice in ways that constrained their efforts and exacted a significant psychological and emotional toll. However, the race-gendered experiences of equity directors also constituted vital forms of knowledge and expertise for reshaping their roles and increasing their access to valued organizational resources. Paradoxically, then, racialized-gendered organizations functioned to diminish the influence of Black and other women of color equity directors who used their racialized-gendered knowledge to make strategic organizational change. We conclude with a call for attention to the nexus of individual-organizational dynamics in the practice of equity-focused leaders in tandem with longitudinal examinations of equity leadership across educational systems.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether race-specific language use can advance organizational learning about the racialized nature of school problems. The study addressed two questions: first, is teacher use of racial language associated with how they frame school discipline problems during conversational exchanges? Second, what do patterns of associations suggest about racial language use as an asset that may influence an organization’s ability to analyze discipline problems? Design/methodology/approach Co-occurrence analysis was used to explore patterns between racial language use and problem analysis during team conversational exchanges regarding school discipline problems. Findings When participants used race-specific and race-proxy language, they identified more problems and drew on multiple frames to describe school discipline problems. Research limitations/implications This paper substantiates that race-specific language is beneficial for organizational learning. Practical implications The findings suggest that leading language communities may be an integral, yet overlooked lever for organizational learning and improvement. Prioritizing actions that promote race-specific conversations among school teams can reveal racism/racial conflict and subsequently increase the potential for change. Originality/value This paper combines organizational change and race talk research to highlight the importance of professional talk routines in organizational learning.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has been well researched and validated as an important component of youth education (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011; Elias et. al., 1997). However, much of the literature implies a very monolithic approach to SEL interventions (Watts, Griffith, & Abdul-Adil, 1999). The current study examines a predominately African-American urban alternative school’s unique approach to reaching students’ SEL needs. Utilizing Consensual Qualitative Research (Hill, 2012), researchers interviewed 15 staff members at the school, ranging from teachers to mental health professionals to community educators, to obtain a thorough understanding of the unique approaches to SEL within urban alternative education. Implications for educators and mental health professionals working in alternative educational settings are discussed

This study presents findings from an ethnographic content analysis of 15 chronological district-wide annual codes of student conduct from a large urban US school district. I frame policy creation and modification processes as reflections of societal shifts in perceptions of student behaviors. I looked to the policy documents to explore the possibility that school organizations have, over time, shifted toward school discipline frameworks that get students into deeper trouble today than in years past. The analysis yielded policy changes that, over time, make severe punishment increasingly likely. I refer to the change phenomena as net - deepening of school discipline. I address the pitfalls that net-deepening policy changes pose, with an emphasis on the potential for net-deepening to undermine the effectiveness of proactive and restorative forms of school discipline. The article offers to educators, policy-makers, and researchers conceptual and analytical considerations for developing proactive restorative discipline policies that meets the educational needs of all students.

Hip-hop-based education (HHBE) research analyzes how hip-hop culture is used to produce favorable educational outcomes. Despite its richness, the work reveals little about how to prepare practicing K-12 teachers to use HHBE toward the critical ends reflected in extant HHBE literature. In this article, we challenge many tacit assumptions of HHBE research by examining the curricular and pedagogical wants and needs of in-service teachers who are interested in HHBE but who are not familiar with hip-hop's unique history and culture. Through a collaborative self-study with a teacher-educator, we, as Black male hip-hop insiders, reflect on the promises and pitfalls of preparing predominantly White teachers to incorporate hip-hop into their teaching and learning repertoire.

Education scholars and practitioners have much to learn about engagement and motivation of Black males by directing their inquiries to more organic sites of hip-hop cultural production outside of schools. One such site is the hip-hop’s informal labor economy where Black males engage in earning money through hip-hop cultural production. Labor practices include a myriad of activities such as beat making, promoting shows, teaching dance classes, managing studios and recording sessions, artist development, visual art, and other modes of hip-hop cultural production. Through exploring the decision-making process of Black males that opt to participate in informal labor in lieu of formal labor, we examine what it is that compels their engagement and motivation efforts in hip-hop production. We find that participating in hip-hop cultural production gives Black males: (1) the autonomy to control their own image and maintain their individuality and (2) a sense of worth and belonging to something positive. From these findings, we discuss the need for schools to model themselves after such fields where Black males demonstrate high levels of engagement, motivation, and mastery.

Street fiction is a popular new genre of novels that focus on contemporary urban life. Marc Lamont Hill, Biany Perez, and Decoteau J. Irby introduce this genre, describing what it is, who writes it, and who reads it. They also offer critiques of the genre and strategies for linking street fiction to the English classroom.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago, she has seen more equity leadership in action than ever before. The numbers and geographic and racial diversity' of protestors made the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests the largest in LIS. history, according to reporting by The Nexe York Times, and set into motion what Stanford sociology' professor Douglas McAdam, in a newspaper interview, called \"a period of significant, sustained and widespread social, political change ... that is as rare in society as it is potentially consequential.\" [...]these districts had the capacity to level up their racial equity efforts.

School safety is widely recognized as an ongoing problem in United States public schools. Guided by the New Right, the school safety problem has been framed as an issue of school crime, violence, and student misbehavior that is best mitigated by zero tolerance policies. This stance has emerged as an agenda that has proven disproportionately detrimental to poor urban students of color who have experienced unforeseen levels of punishment since the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994 endorsed zero tolerance. Despite mounting evidence that zero tolerance approaches to discipline do little to deter school crime and violence or make schools safe, little ground has been gained in interrupting the ideology, policies, practices, and discourses of the zero tolerance agenda. This research project theorizes and explores how ideology, cultural-politics, and discourse foster the tendency for policy creation and codification to legitimize the New Right’s official knowledge of zero tolerance ideology and policy as a panacea for the school safety problem. To accomplish this, I conduct an ethnographic content analysis of codes of student conduct to examine the imbued ideologies, discourses, and policy changes that emerge from the cultural politics of managing school discipline over the last 15 years. Through this process, I lend empirical credence to the concepts of net-widening and net-deepening. With these guiding concepts, I push the field beyond the zero tolerance discourse on school safety and discipline to establish a generative alternative to understanding school discipline policies called the school discipline net framework. The research establishes a precedent for thinking more deeply and creatively about the perils and possibilities of school discipline policies. Major findings include the identification of several school policy changes that make the discipline experience both increasingly likely and potentially more punitive for students. Finally, through substantiating the school discipline net as a framework for discoursing, researching, guiding policy creation, and recognizing and locating sites of agency, this work establishes that it is indeed possible to engage issues critical in the field in ways that can transfer into the highly politicized school policy context dominated by New Right ideologies and discourses.