Although school segregation has been illegal for nearly seven decades, it persists in a public education context increasingly impacted by market-based ideologies. Indeed, many present-day school integration policies are having to negotiate school choice while simultaneously trying to serve the public good. Through a critical policy analysis (CPA) of three policies in school districts with distinct histories of integration efforts, we examine these tensions by exploring how racial discourses are factors in contemporary school integration policies and how discourses of choice uphold or disrupt existing racial inequities. In our CPA, we pair Critical Discourse Analysis and interest divergence to better understand power behind and within discourse, and how discourses of race and school choice illustrate new but perhaps reminiscent shifts toward interest divergence. In doing so, we show how policies themselves cannot be disentangled from the rhetoric, power, accountability, and politics surrounding their development and implementation.

Purpose: For culturally responsive practices (CRPs) in schools to be successful, educational leaders must look outside of the school and consider school, district, and system-level policies and practices that influence the sustainability of culturally responsive classrooms. The purpose of our study was to conduct a comparative case study and explore how four district leaders promoted CRPs throughout each of their districts. Research Design: Situated in the Midwest, we used a comparative case study to explore the approaches of four Black women school district leaders. Data included a focus group interview with the leaders; four individual, follow-up interviews; and artifacts or documents provided by the leaders. The data collected was analyzed using the Culturally Responsive School Leadership analytical framework. Results and Discussion: Findings discuss school district leadership's responsibility to promote CRPs; district leaders’ ability to foster trusting relationships with educators; and district-wide efforts to engage in purposeful teacher retention practices. A discussion and conclusion include implications considering how district leadership can influence the implementation of CRPs in schools and classrooms.

Understandings of teacher expertise in the US have transformed over the past 40 years, arguably being “narrowed” and “numericized” due to high-stakes accountability and neoliberal education reform movements. While this trend has been thoroughly studied under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and Race to the Top regimes, less consideration has been given since the Every Study Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced NCLB in 2015, which notably pivoted away from some of the most stringent accountability practices of the previous era. This paper begins a new line of inquiry into teacher expertise in our current federal policy context, especially considering how understandings of expertise are constructed in school districts that never adopted the most high-stakes evaluation measures. By relying on Jessica Holloway’s (2021) technologies of risk management, this paper explores how teachers in one school understand expertise, focusing specifically on how evaluation and assessment technologies engage with and influence these understandings. Ultimately, it was found that teachers in fact held a plurality of understandings, yet complex and sometimes conflicting influences of assessment and evaluation practices also emerged. This paper argues that although risk management technologies have become commonplace, scholars and practitioners alike should continue to scrutinize their use under ESSA, particularly considering how they are being used, who they primarily benefit, and what consequences come from our reliance upon them.

No abstract