What Leaders Believe: Increasing Educational Attainment Among Urban Youth

Abstract

Urban community leaders describe their perceptions of critical issues in education and offer recommendations for the creation of a college-going culture (CGC). This qualitative study employed a maximum entropy analysis. Results demonstrate critical issues with increasing educational attainment including complexity of the urban school system, limited traditional parental involvement, and self-acceptance among youth. This study emphasizes the importance of a CGC inclusive of the Community Cultural Wealth model, culturally sensitive teachers, and community-connected leaders. Research suggests that educational settings that value student’s and families’ Community Cultural Wealth can increase the number of students that matriculate through the educational pipeline.

Newcomer Emergent Bilingual Students’ Meaning-Making in Urban Biology Classrooms: A Communities of Practice Perspective

“…This study joins an ongoing conversation concerning EB—and particularly Latino—student participation in secondary urban science classrooms. On the one hand, this conversation recognizes that contextual features, such as pedagogical approaches (Gomez et al, 2019), program models (Buxton & Caswell, 2020), and teachers’ positioning of students (Person et al, 2021; Shepherd, 2020) inform student achievement. On the other hand, this conversation recognizes that EB features, such as language proficiency (Harman et al, 2020), academic and cultural experiences (Kirmaci et al, 2019), and peer interactions (Beltramo, 2017) also shape achievement.…”