Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

School choice policies have expanded rapidly across the United States over the past several decades, especially in the state of Arizona. Research suggests that widespread school choice policies have had negative consequences for minoritized families. However, more research is needed to better understand the experiences of minoritized families with school choice policies.

We examine a specialized public school in Arizona with high out-of-district open enrollment, located within a gentrifying, working-class community of color. Using the lenses of Whiteness as Property and racial capitalism, we highlight how racial, legal, and economic forces led families of color to be displaced and dispossessed of rights to equitable access to schools. We respond to the following research question: How do race and social class shape families’ experiences with a school embedded in a district that is navigating and leveraging Arizona’s competitive school choice environment?

To address our research question, we conducted a qualitative embedded case study of a focal school. An embedded case study, which entails one or more subunits of analysis, is well-suited to our study in that we consider the subunit of the school as embedded in its school district, within the context of Arizona’s hypercompetitive school choice policy landscape. We interviewed in-district and out-of-district parents with and without access to the school, district administrators, and school board members. In addition, we conducted observations and collected publicly available documents.

Our research provides a window into the ways that ostensibly innocuous school choice policies may displace and dispossess families of color of various social classes. Based on this study, we offer several implications. First, our study shows the necessity of using a theoretical lens that accounts for the intrinsic nature of racism in our policy, legal, and economic systems. Second, the research demonstrates a clear connection between families’ educational displacement and dispossession, and Arizona’s hypercompetitive school choice environment. Third, our study illustrates how school districts, as they navigate a competitive school choice landscape to compete for enrollment, may leverage school choice policies in ways that displace or dispossess families of color across social classes.

Teacher leadership is frequently traced to U.S. reform movements of the 1980s, a framing that narrows the construct’s historical timeline and overlooks earlier traditions of teacher-led professional coordination and advocacy. By centering the history of Black teachers in the segregated South, this study challenges the dominant periodization and foregrounds a longer professional lineage grounded in equity, advocacy, and collective responsibility.

This study examines the following question: What historical evidence highlights the teacher leadership practices of Black teachers in southern segregated schooling communities? The objective is to determine whether contemporary conceptualizations of teacher leadership can be traced to what is known historically about Black teachers’ professional work, particularly within the oppressive social, political, and educational contexts of the Jim Crow–era South Carolina.

Guided by critical historical inquiry, this study takes the form of a historical case study of the Palmetto Education Association’s Department of Classroom Teachers (PEA-DCT) from 1956 to 1967. Archival records were analyzed using qualitative frequency-based coding aligned with the seven domains of the Teacher Leader Model Standards. Frequency counts were treated as ordinal indicators of relative emphasis, supplemented by memo writing and iterative interpretation to preserve historical nuance.

The PEA-DCT case demonstrates that Black teachers enacted leadership as integrated professional practice embedded within organizational systems they designed and sustained. The study recommends that the field account for this deeper historical lineage when defining teacher leadership and urges scholars to foreground equity, professional dignity, and collective responsibility as foundational rather than emergent dimensions of the construct.

In interrogating systems of whiteness that govern the protection of language ownership, this study draws on raciolinguistics and highlights the experiences of Hispanic male teachers in Texas K–12 systems, where responsibilities and knowledge sharing were shaped by assumed linguistic abilities. On a national scale, Hispanic male teachers account for less than 2% of the teacher workforce. As noted in the literature, this small percentage is due to several reasons, such as teacher pathway programs not being inclusive; teachers having to navigate educational systems that reinforce racialized, gendered, and linguistic prejudices; and, as documented in this study, stereotypical assumptions of their linguistic identities. The overrepresentation of Eurocentric language perspectives and the underrepresentation of the perspectives of those historically marginalized that threaten settler futurity ideologies within the vast majority of K–12 environments influence how Hispanic male teachers navigate their educational spaces when representing all of their identities.

For this study, we examine how 839 Hispanic male teachers navigate their Texas K–12 school environments when assumptions about their linguistic identities impact their sense of belonging, professional opportunities, and relationships with colleagues, administrators, and students. This paper contributes to the literature on Hispanic male teachers by centering their voices, which are often excluded by dominant epistemologies.

Our research draws on data from the National Hispanic Male Teacher Survey (NHMTS), which explored the experiences and characteristics of Hispanic male teachers in the United States. Participants were identified through the fall 2021 Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS) survey, which is administered by the Texas Education Agency (TEA). Survey design prioritized inclusive and equitable practices by employing multiple-select and self-describe options, in addition to working alongside Hispanic male teachers to develop the study. Our analysis of the qualitative data, including survey responses and focus groups, was done in relation to the literature through a reflective lens.

Hispanic male teachers in Texas navigated assumptions of their linguistic identities and expressed (1) a lack of racial and cultural awareness from colleagues and administrators, (2) assimilation pedagogies and praxis inside and outside the classroom, and (3) bilingualism as both a bridge and a burden. The dismantling of white Eurocentric language ideological practices within educational systems begins with counterstories, like those of Hispanic male teachers in this study, that refute the normative behaviors and beliefs that govern the systematization of white Eurocentric language norms as standard and return ownership of one’s linguistic identity to those who have been siloed by inferior assumptions.

Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) have acknowledged culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) as a transformative approach to addressing equity in higher education. However, faculty often lack the formal training and communal support necessary to implement CRP meaningfully. With HSIs enrolling nearly two-thirds of all Latinx undergraduates, understanding how institutions cultivate servingness through faculty development is essential.

This study examines how faculty members who participated in a CRP-focused curriculum design institute characterize their experiences as both learners and educators. It explores how these experiences shape their teaching philosophies, classroom practices, professional identities, and understanding of servingness. The central research question is: How do faculty characterize their experiences of learning and teaching as a result of their engagement in a CRP-focused curriculum design institute?

This study employs a qualitative, embedded case study design to analyze the experiences of 25 faculty participants across disciplines at an HSI. We analyzed interviews and classroom observations from faculty participants for this study. Guided by CRP and servingness frameworks, the thematic analysis revealed how this institute fostered transformation, cultivated pedagogical reflexivity, and built communal capacity.

Findings suggest that faculty experienced both personal and pedagogical transformation, practiced reflexivity as an ongoing process of teaching with intentionality and equity, and built communal capacity by cultivating cross-disciplinary connections that advanced servingness as both a pedagogical and institutional commitment. Together, these insights highlight that CRP is not only a matter of individual teaching strategies but also a structural shift, positioning faculty development as a powerful lever for equity-centered transformation in higher education.

Community colleges have played an essential role in expanding access to higher education for students from historically minoritized backgrounds, many of whom enter with aspirations to transfer. However, community colleges operate within a broader transfer ecosystem in which students of color continue to experience disproportionately low transfer rates. As critical sites where students make academic progress toward transfer, classrooms remain underexplored in transfer research and in efforts to understand and address transfer disparities.

This study is guided by the strategic racial equity framework and examines classroom interactions and policies in relation to the transfer trajectories and aspirations of community college students of color. The study also explores faculty perceptions of their role in students’ transfer progress and the ways their class policies and practices contribute to or remove barriers to transfer.

Stemming from a larger mixed methods project, this qualitative study drew on individual, semistructured interviews with 22 students and seven educators from one large Midwestern community college. This article centers on five students who discussed the role of race in relation to their classroom experiences as they prepared for transfer and on three faculty members who taught high-enrollment courses. Interviews with students addressed their academic progress toward transfer, including classroom and racialized experiences. Faculty interviews focused on their teaching practices and perceptions of their role in supporting students’ transfer progress. I used the strategic racial equity framework to draw attention to hidden contributors to transfer inequities for students of color while also harnessing students’ strengths and faculty members’ efforts to support transfer progress within and beyond the classroom.

The findings reveal that classrooms are racialized and racializing spaces that mediate transfer through students’ experiences with exclusionary pedagogical practices, racial microaggressions, and other racialized interactions. These experiences took emotional and academic tolls on students that at times disrupted their transfer trajectories. Faculty who sought to support students of color through equity-centered practices and policies lacked the institutional resources and time needed to sustain the level of deep equity-centered work they desired. The findings affirm that advancing equitable transfer requires a commitment to embedding racial equity throughout the college, with renewed attention to the classroom. This includes preparing and supporting educators to better serve students of color along their transfer trajectories, strengthening racial bias reporting systems and institutional accountability, and supporting colleges in redefining and working toward equitable transfer and student success through classroom-centered and structural changes.

Early reading achievement is shaped by students’ skills and by the motivational, socioeconomic, and institutional conditions in which literacy learning occurs. In Türkiye, this issue is salient because schooling is constitutionally monolingual, although many fourth-grade students report speaking a language other than Turkish at home. This home–school language mismatch raises questions about how reading confidence, socioeconomic status, and school academic climate are associated with achievement across levels of exposure to Turkish.

This study examines how students’ confidence in reading, school emphasis on academic success, and socioeconomic status are associated with fourth-grade reading achievement in Türkiye. It also investigates whether the estimated indirect association between reading confidence and achievement through school emphasis on academic success varies by socioeconomic status. Analyses are conducted separately across four groups defined by students’ frequency of speaking Turkish at home: always, almost always, sometimes, and never.

The study uses cross-sectional data from the PIRLS 2021 Türkiye national sample. After screening, the analytic sample included 5,421 fourth-grade students: 3,836 who always spoke Turkish at home, 698 who almost always did so, 743 who sometimes did so, and 144 who never did so. Reading achievement was analyzed using five PIRLS plausible values; the focal predictors were reading confidence, school emphasis on academic success, and home socioeconomic status. Hayes’s PROCESS Model 59 was estimated within each home-language subgroup, with coefficients combined across plausible values and interpreted as conditional associations.

Reading confidence was positively associated with achievement across all four home-language groups, with the largest coefficient among students who never spoke Turkish at home. School emphasis on academic success also showed positive direct associations with achievement, suggesting that academic climate is especially relevant in linguistically constrained contexts. The estimated indirect pathway through school emphasis on academic success was detectable in the “sometimes” subgroup, while a comparable but less precise estimate appeared in the “never” subgroup. Socioeconomic status remained strongly associated with achievement, especially among students with less frequent exposure to Turkish at home. The findings support combining reading-confidence supports, academically focused school climates, and language-responsive policies for students navigating home–school language mismatch.