Decolonizing Urban Education

Hearing and Listening: Bridging the Leadership Divide between School Connectedness and Students’ Lived Realities

“…Our findings are part of a larger conversation as to what urban education is, how it is defined, and the need to move away from a deficit ideology and view students as assets with their own potential in the face of systemic urban context barriers such as poverty, homelessness, lack of resources, racism, etc. (Coloma, 2020; Milner, 2012; Welsh & Swain, 2020). Despite their differing personal lives and trajectories, they all described challenges that were similar as well as school-based supports that would have better prepared them for the next phase of their lives.…”

“…Often this has led to school administrators adhering to an urban school deficit ideology and degrading or just ignoring students based on biased prejudice, particularly against Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) students or low-income students (Castro, 2020). This deficit ideology in urban education has defined the policy research conceptions and enactment of policy has been based on the nexus between the presence of BIPOC students and families, and the ingrained ideology that these populations of students cause urban schools to be viewed as “bad.” This negates the strengths of BIOPC populations and the cultural and racial wealth that is embedded within urban communities (Coloma, 2020). Milner (2012) conceptually defined urban education through the lenses of urban intensive, urban emergent and urban characteristic.…”

Successful urban elementary music educators : a phenomenological investigation

“…While the definition of urban is clear among educational researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, there is no universal definition of urban education (Welsh & Swain, 2020). Milner and Lomotey (2014) and Coloma (2020) implied that this lack of a universal definition creates a gap, while Schaffer et al (2018) provides quantitative statistics on urban education. Definitions of urban education are articulated most frequently using descriptive rather than empirical terms.…”

“…In the Handbook of Urban Education, editors Milner and Lomotey (2014) suggested that there was a "definitional gap" because "research has failed to provide a comprehensive, uniform definition of urban education" (p. xix). An examination of various academic journals that focus on urban education reveals a rich array of topics pursued under the rubric of urban education, but they do not offer any singular definition of what urban education means (Coloma, 2020). The vast majority of studies ground their definitions of urban education in location, size, and population (Schaffer et al, 2018).…”

“…Examples of these assumptions and stereotypes include characterizing the students as participating in negative social behaviors like drug abuse, violence, and/or staying away from school without good reason (Doyle, 2009); or as children with behavioral problems, parental noninvolvement issues, and possessing skills and understandings that do not readily transfer to meet teacher or school expectations (Benedict, 2006). When some educators, parents, politicians, or philanthropists say "urban" or "urban schools" or "urban students," they are usually referring to schools with a large and visible proportion of students of color, particularly African American and/or Latinx students from low-income or working-class backgrounds (Coloma;.…”