In response to numerous calls for more rigorous STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education to improve US competitiveness and the job prospects of next-generation workers, especially those from low-income and minority groups, a growing number of schools emphasizing STEM have been established in the US over the past decade. However, existing STEM schools vary substantially in the way they are organized, the students they attract, and the outcomes they advertise, and there have been few empirical studies of their effectiveness. This comparative case study examines the opportunity structures for STEM at eight public high schools, four in Denver, Colorado, and four in Buffalo, New York. All of the schools were "inclusive" (no admission requirements) and served predominantly lowincome and majority minority students. All but one school had been designated "low-performing" for failure to meet federal accountability requirements. In each city, two of the study schools had recently been reorganized to be "STEM-focused" in some way, and two were traditional, comprehensive high schools. We found that the STEM-focused schools were launched with much enthusiasm and high expectations. In both cities, STEM-focused schools achieved some modest success initially but were unable to maintain their gains. Overall among the schools in this study, the STEM-focused high schools did little to improve STEM opportunities compared to the comprehensive high schools. We do not mean to suggest that STEM schools are a bad idea, but that claims and expectations for them must be examined in the context of their implementation, and STEM schools for low-income and minority students are unlikely to be successful without more attention to systemic issues in urban education. # 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach, XXX-XXX, 2015.

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In this article, we examine the manifestation and consequences of shadow capital within two public, urban, nonselective, college preparatory–designated high schools serving exclusively nondominant students. Informed by three years of ethnographic data, we argue that the transference of a historically elite college preparatory education from dominant institutions to nondominant schools results in fundamental changes to the dominant capital it is expected to yield. Rather than generating highly valued capital within the field of education, it produces what we call “shadow capital.” As a distinct form of cultural capital, shadow capital outwardly resembles yet contains only traces of dominant cultural capital, thus failing to yield the same kind of exchange value in the postsecondary marketplace. Shadow capital offers explanatory power for the many unmet promises of educational reform and further challenges the often well-intended democratizing forces that paradoxically reinforce inequality in education.

Although there has been significant research examining the practice of culturally responsive teaching, little empirical work to date has examined the role that community-engaged, teacher preparation models play in shaping prospective teachers’ orientation toward cultural responsiveness. This study of 60 preservice teacher candidates enrolled in a program of community-engaged teacher preparation at a midsized Midwestern public university specifically examined the ways in which caring relationships between preservice teachers and volunteer community mentors scaffolded candidates’ contextualized understanding of culture, community, and identity of children and families. Findings provide evidence that as candidates experience authentic caring within the space of supportive relationships, they emerge equipped to care in more authentic, culturally responsive ways for their students.

In this article, we present findings from a three-year comparative longitudinal and ethnographic study of how schools in two cities, Buffalo and Denver, have taken up STEM education reform, including the idea of “inclusive STEM-focused schools,” to address weaknesses in urban high schools with majority low-income and minority students. Although introduced with great fanfare, the data indicate that well-meaning efforts toward expanding opportunities in STEM-focused schools for low-income underrepresented minorities quickly dissolved. We focus on mechanisms that seem to underlie this dissolution and consider its contributions to short- and long-term inequalities.