What keeps students interested and engaged in school? Unfortunately, in today's climate of increased rigor in classrooms, we are simultaneously losing sight of the need to provide students with an education that is both challenging and stimulating. In this paper, we discuss youth disengagement and offer suggestions to improve our overall knowledge of academic engagement issues. We discuss the historical concept of engagement, more specifically, its shift from a uni-dimensional to multidimensional concept, and suggest that research concentrate on better understanding the interplay among setting and identity when examining issues of youth engagement in schools. Fundamentally, we strongly assert that engagement research needs to adopt a more critical stance that provides students with opportunities to examine and to critique the educational system in which they participate (or sometimes refuse to participate). Only when students see the purpose of engaging in schools, as students and agents of change, will engagement and students' academics and lives improve.
This article describes an effort by principals and university researchers to create student co-research groups at several high schools. The authors describe the student co-research team concept, how it provides principals with ways to actively engage students in ongoing schoolreform efforts, and how it assists them in gathering and analyzing data regarding school change. More specifically, the article describes an effort to create student co-research groups across school sites to address dilemmas districtwide and within specific schools. Co-research team enactment, training, and support are discussed and suggestions for principals to sustain such a concept are recommended.
Structural changes necessary in detracking efforts challenge not only the technical dimensions of schooling, but also the normative and political dimensions. We argue that detracking reform confronts fundamental issues of power, control, and legitimacy that are played out in ideological struggles over the meaning of knowledge, intelligence, ability, and merit. This article presents results from a three-year longitudinal case study of ten racially and socioeconomically mixed secondary schools participating in detracking reform. We connect prevailing norms about race and social class that inform educators’, parents’, and students’ conceptions of intelligence, ability, and giftedness with the local political context of detracking. By examining these ideological aspects of detracking we make a case for reexamining common presumptions that resistance to policies providing greater opportunities to low-income and minority children is driven by rational estimates of the learning costs and benefits associated with such reforms.
The 1999 AERA report The Dynamics of Race in Higher Education: An Examination of the Evidence (www. aera.net/reports/dynamics. htm) concluded that: "(1) there is clear evidence of continuing inequities in educational opportunity along racial categories; (2) test-based definitions of merit are incomplete; (3) race is a major social psychological factor in the American consciousness and behaviors; and (4) racially diversified environments, when properly This article describes the efforts at the University of California, San Diego to increase campus diversity by developing collaborative school-university partnerships with 18 local elementary and secondary schools in low-income, urban communities. Education research on school reform and sociology of education are drawn from to help examine the process of developing partnerships. This research provides a theoretical lens to study how multiple contexts (e.g., schools, districts, and the university) shape partnership work
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