In this introduction to the special issue, the editors argue that struggles over the meaning(s) of race inform and are informed by educational policy deliberation and implementation. Educational policy, then, contributes to the "common sense" about race. At the same time, educational policy reflects, and is an instantiation of, that "common sense." The editors explain how the analyses offered in this special issue serve to expand what it means to do critical policy research, and more specifically, enhance our understanding of how race acts as a powerful force in determining educational opportunities, experiences, and outcomes.

In 2009, the New York City Department of Education determined that Brandeis High School would be closed. Far from an anomaly, Brandeis is one among more than a hundred schools that have been closed since the recentralization of the City's school system under Mayoral Control. Education activists and critical scholars of education have described such "sweeps" of school closings and the broader constellation of projects and technologies associated with them as indicative of neoliberal education reform and of the ways that "accumulation by dispossession" (Harvey, 2005) plays out on the U.S. "home front." Despite an increased galvanization of resistance in recent years, the authors interrogate what else we might learn about neoliberal education restructuring (and how we might contest it) by attending to the last years of Brandeis in order to specifically explore the following: 1) how the conditions of dispossession impact resistance from the perspective of school workers, and 2) how the process of dispossession was accompanied by an investment from those with privilege in the public good of education that was contingent upon race-and class-based exclusions.

In the era of Black Lives Matter (#BLM), urban teacher education does not exist in isolation. The white supremacist, neoliberal context that impacts all aspects of Black lives also serves to support antiblackness within the structures of teacher education. In this article, the authors, who are grounded in a race radical analytical and political framework, share a vision of what it means to be an urban teacher who actively understands and teaches in solidarity with #BLM. The authors unpack their theoretical framework and the vision of #BLM while examining the state of teacher education in this era of neoliberal multiculturalism. The authors contemplate what a race radical, #BLM-aligned, approach to urban teacher education might look like. The article concludes by addressing ways that teacher educators must be in active solidarity with the #BLM movement in order to better prepare teachers who understand that the lives of their students matter within and outside of their classrooms.

No abstract

Still one of the fasting growing minoritized groups in the U.S., Latinxs [we are using the term Latinx rather than Latino/a or Hispanic, unless a term is used by cited resources. See Scharrón-de Río and Aja (The case For "Latinx"-And why this term matters for intersectionality-everyday feminism [magazine], 2016)], historically, have endured major socio-economic and educational crises that have produced challenges to mental health and wellness. Unfortunately, the challenges many Latinxs face are often overlooked, misunderstood and underserved. This paper is a study of high school youth who were part of the Education in our Barrios Project, #Barri-oEdProject, a Philadelphia-based participatory action research (PAR) collaborative, where high school-aged and undergraduate youth work together to conduct research on issues that affect their local communities and schools. Using an ecological-feminist-Latinx framework (Heiman and Artiga in Beyond health care: the role of social