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The purpose of this study is to examine the school selection process of parents whose children attended an urban school district in Northern California. Like numerous urban school districts across the United States, the district highlighted in this study also encountered students exiting its schools for the past decade. The findings shared in this paper from a mixed methods case study of parents whose children attend school in the district. Data were based on a quantitative survey and qualitative focus groups. The data indicate parents consider several key factors when selecting schools for their children including academics, class size, and differentiated instruction and support for their children; the school and administration's relationship to diversity and the community; and the overall enrollment process. The parents' narratives also revealed educational leaders must create a culturally relevant learning community in order to ensure parents, students, and community stakeholders will garner the support, resources, curricula, and learning activities to stop the exodus of children from schools within the school district.

Through a case study of two doctoral programs situated in the United States, this essay highlights how doctoral programs designed to prepare leaders in K-16 institutions and other contexts can be "framed around questions of equity, ethics, and social justice to bring about solutions to complex problems of practice" (CPED, 2016; Buss, Zambo, Zambo, Perry, & Williams, 2017; Zambo, Buss & Zambo; 2015). More specifically, we argue that programs should be able to clearly and explicitly articulate their distinctive understanding of "social justice" and trace the ways that this understanding is operationalized in particular facets of their program. In the following sections, we first offer a brief overview of our educational contexts, our programmatic definitions of social justice, and the ways we put that definition to work in our courses. Importantly, we offer the following as work-in-progress examples to serve as entry points into a larger conversation about operationalizing specific understandings of social justice in education doctorate programs, rather than as exemplars or models.

Social Foundations of Education (SFE) courses play a critical role in preparing professional, effective PK-12 teachers, yet, for reasons argued in this article and elsewhere, such courses remain under attack. In this article, by arguing what SFE "stands for" as opposed to what it "stands against," the authors intend to persuasively present non-SFE teacher educators with formerly unknown or unclear knowledge of the SFE discipline and its intended outcomes with the goal they may become comfortable with--if not outright advocates for--their courses' content and knowledgeable on its purpose(s), rather than viewing SFE teacher educators and courses as unnecessary, radical, and burdensome to PK-12 teacher preparation curricula.

This essay documents a few key examples of the critical pedagogy and curriculum that the authors employ to challenge pre-service and in-service teachers to consider the concrete and theoretical contexts of taking on a social-activist-teacher persona. Their vision of social justice is rooted firmly in the critical tradition, as it is anchored in excavating unjust social and economic formations that imperil the vast majority of the world's population, while concomitantly empowering the economic elite. Not only do they believe that teacher educators must take the lead in helping their students recognize the social, political, and economic forces creating injustice in schools and in the wider society, but they must help current and future teachers develop emancipatory visions of how to develop instructional designs, collaborate with educators, and engage in activist initiatives which have the potential to eliminate social inequalities and build institutional structures based on democracy, equity, and fairness. Like many teacher educators, the authors have worked in institutions where almost 95% of the teacher education students have self-identified as "White." Because of the difficulties of working with this nearly ubiquitous at-risk group (at risk for acting as oppressors), the authors focus their attention in this essay on the challenges White in-service and preservice teachers pose to practicing critical pedagogy. (Contains 3 notes.)

On September 27, 2012, John R. Silber died--he was 86 years old. From 1971 to 1996 Silber led Boston University (BU) as its President, and from 1996 to 2002, as [...]