Three community college faculty members used improvement science techniques to design, develop, and refine contextualized developmental mathematics lessons, where language and literacy pedagogy and related supports figured prominently in these instructional materials. This article reports on the role that their design experiences played in professional learning. The article uses a model of professional learning developed by Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002) as the lens to describe and analyze their experiences. Results indicated theoretically noteworthy variation among the faculty. The results highlight a strong connection between faculty willingness to experiment, during trial enactment of these lessons, in their classrooms and faculty growth in knowledge and belief structures about the importance of language and literacy to mathematics teaching and learning. Implications for design-based development, as an important ongoing professional development activity for mathematics instructors, are discussed.

For the past century, standardized testing in the United States has been a measure of school success on both the individual and organizational level. A seemingly benign measure, such testing has informed the allocation of resources and placement of students in coursework commensurate with their perceived abilities. However, I argue that standardized tests serve a more malicious function in schooling by systematically erasing epistemologies that differ from the dominant society. Tracing the history of U.S. standardized testing in the 20th century, I conclude that such tests have marginalized low-income students and students of color, and will continue to do so as long as they are heavily relied upon as measures of intelligence and success. KeywordsStandardized testing, students of color, erasure, funds of knowledge, critical race theory Whenever there is a conversation about the educational crisis in the USA, students of color are at the center of this discourse. It is widely known that students of color-especially those identifying as African American, Latino, and Native American-are more likely to attend under-resourced schools (Darling-Hammond, 2004) and to have less qualified teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2004;Lankford et al., 2002;Peske and Haycock, 2006) than white peers. They also have higher dropout rates (Christle et al., 2007) and lower standardized test scores (Jencks and Phillips, 2011). A plethora of factors, from structural to cultural, have been named as the cause(s) of student failure in schools. Some scholars have suggested

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Black parents are often presumed to be uninvolved in their children’s education, especially in mathematics. These stereotypes are arguably sustained by White, middle-class expectations for parent engagement. This qualitative study challenges the dominant narrative by exploring the ways eight Black parents support their elementary-aged children’s mathematical identities. Although many scholars have examined the relationship between mathematics identity and academic outcomes, few have explored the role parents play in this identity development. Drawing on Martin’s (2000) mathematics identity framework and McCarthy Foubert’s (2019) Racial Realist Parent Engagement framework, the author argues that Black parents’ experiential knowledge of race and racism in mathematical spaces positions them to teach their children about the everyday importance and usefulness of mathematics. Using parent interviews and family observations, the author’s findings suggest the parents supported their children’s mathematics identities using four approaches: 1) pragmatic (emphasizing financial literacy and basic life skills), 2) aspirational (promoting math-intensive careers), 3) affirmational (sharing words of encouragement), and 4) race-conscious (applying mathematical concepts to lessons in Black history, culture, and anti-Blackness). Implications for educators are discussed, as parent identity support strategies may be useful for reform-oriented teachers seeking to foster positive mathematical identities in Black children.