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This paper examines how school leaders working within schools serving immigrant English Learners negotiate teacher evaluation policies, including how they influence compliance with mandated policies, communicate those policies to teachers, and guide implementation within their professional communities. We explore how a leader in a school with positive outcomes negotiates external policies to support authentic professional growth and maximize learning opportunities for immigrant ELs. In addition, we draw on data from a comparison school that also serves a high proportion of ELs, but where policies have been enacted in ways that focus on compliance, increase anxiety, and add little value to EL students. In doing so, we show how leaders can mitigate the unintended consequences of mandated policies by addressing teachers’ uncertainty and anxieties, while reaffirming humanizing institutional practices that honor the local knowledge of teachers and deepen teachers’ collective responsibility for immigrant youth.

In this article, we explore how locally situated educational practices and policies aimed at inclusion and integration may contribute to racialised exclusion for students. Our analysis brings toget...

Drawing on qualitative case study research in four small schools, this paper explores the relationship between the professional contexts of schools—specifically supports for 1) collaboration focuse...

Exploring critiques of immigrant segregation, this paper considers how schools exclusively serving immigrant EL students are supportive “counterpublics.” Drawing on data from two ethnograph...

The policies and discourses of the Trump administration reflect such extreme examples of inhumane policies and racializing logic that they are easy to identify and call out. In this essay, I focus ...

With the rise of nationalism and the current contentious debate on immigration in the US, school leaders and educators are faced with difficult questions about how to negotiate sensitive political topics, including debates on immigration. In this article, Reva Jaffe-Walter, Chandler Patton Miranda, and Stacey J. Lee explore how educators grapple with the political policies and discourses surrounding immigration with marginalized students who are the subject of those politics. Drawing on research from two US schools exclusively serving recently arrived immigrant students, the authors explore how educators negotiate the teaching of immigration politics during two different time periods, in 2013 during the Obama era “Dreamer” movement and in early 2017 after the inauguration of Donald Trump. They consider how the unique conditions of each political context inform educators' strategies for “teaching into” political events and supporting their immigrant and undocumented students. Their analysis reveals the unique challenges of engaging marginalized students who are the subject of contentious politics in political discussion and action and supports their call for a deeper consideration of students' identities and experiences of politics within scholarly discussions of critical civic engagement.

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of Muslim youth in a Danish lower secondary school, this article explores teacher talk about Muslim immigrant students and how teachers engaged liberal ideals ...

Drawing on ethnographic research in urban schools serving recently arrived immigrant students in New York City, this article considers the importance of drawing on transnational attachments in cult...

In this paper, the authors focus on everyday narrations of the nation as they are taken up by educators in schools in the United States, Denmark and Spain. As the primary institutions within which children from im/migrant communities are incorporated into the nation-state, schools are the key sites within which young people learn the languages and practices of national belonging and citizenship. Comparing ethnographic case studies in the United States, Denmark and Spain, the authors trace the nationalist storylines that serve to frame Muslim youth as particular kinds of racialized and “impossible subjects”. Across national contexts, the authors document similar, often almost verbatim, stories that educators narrated about the disjuncture between liberal ideals of the nation, and what they imagined to be true of Muslim im/migrant youth. They theorize that, despite differences in US and European approaches to immigration, there are consonances in the ways that Muslims are positioned as racialized O...

Capitalizing on national anxieties, right wing populist leaders promise to enforce national borders with new constellations of policies that regulate and exclude Muslim bodies. Using the theoretical tool of “technologies of concern” (Jaffe-Walter, 2016), this essay critiques how state security discourses operate through public schools. Drawing on ethnographic research with Muslim youth in a Danish public school and an analysis of European integration policies, the author analyzes how policies and practices that ostensibly support young people’s integration enact everyday violence and coercive assimilation. Highlighting the perspectives of the young people she worked with, the author argues that state efforts to transform Muslim students into acceptable subjects of the nation-state encouraged their alienation and marginalization.

This research reports data from case studies of three intermediary organizations facing the challenge of scaling up teacher learning. The turn of the century launched scaling-up efforts of all three intermediaries, growing from intimate groups, where founding teachers and staff were key supports for teacher learning, to large multistate organizations. The authors draw on data from three earlier qualitative studies, as well as newly gathered data on professional development at Big Picture Learning, EL Education, and the Internationals Network, and reveal some of the challenges and benefits of taking teacher learning to scale.

In this paper, we examine the role of teacher collaboration in a school that produces positive academic outcomes for immigrant, English Learners (ELs). We also draw on a comparative case study of another school in the same district that has not achieved the same level of success. We illustrate how the high performing site supports and implements deep and sustained collaboration, while the professional conditions of the comparison site results in fragmentation and the isolation of EL teachers. In doing so, we provide qualitative insight into how schools can foster authentic teacher learning and collective responsibility for EL students.

Montclair Cares About Schools (MCAS) is a citizen-activist group in Montclair, N.J., that used Facebook, emails, and online petitions to inform and organize citizens on local educational policy issues. Emerging in response to a new superintendent’s plans to reshape Montclair schools with new teacher evaluations, administrative hires, and extra districtwide quarterly assessments, MCAS has had some degree of success in opening a dialogue and keeping the community informed about changes to the Montclair School District.

With the growing number of immigrant youth moving into new communities and host nations across the globe (Suarez-Orozco, 2007), it is critical that we deepen our understanding of the ways in which schools enable either the civic engagement or the social marginalization of these young people. In this article Reva Jaffe-Walter presents the results of an ethnographic case study of Muslim students and their teachers in a Danish secondary school. Her findings reveal how liberal educational discourses and desires to offer Muslim immigrant students a better life can slide into processes of everyday exclusion in schools. Jaffe-Walter theorizes that immigrants in liberal democracies face technologies of concern—that is, policies and practices that champion the goals of fostering the engagement and social incorporation of immigrant students while simultaneously producing notions of these youth as Other, justifying practices of coercive assimilation (Foucault, 1977; Ong, 1996). She argues that beyond just producing negative representations, technologies of concern position youth within hierarchical schemes of racial and cultural difference that complicate their access to educational resources in schools (Abu El-Haj, 2010; Ong, 1996). This article has implications for the education and social integration of Muslim immigrants within liberal societies, as it reveals the troubling persistence of exclusion buried within practices of concern.

Increasing numbers of immigrant youth are coming of age within global cities that are characterized by growing inequalities and few opportunities for social mobility. These youth face numerous educational obstacles that complicate college and labor market access. This article draws from an ethnographic study of public high schools serving low-income, recently arrived immigrant students and explores how the schools provide students with the academic skills and social capital to support college going. It considers how the schools attempt to create new understandings and expectations of the educational possibilities available to low income immigrant students, thus creating a social imaginary that resists the racialized hierarchies of the global city. [immigrant students, English-language learners, college access, social capital, globalization]

In this article, we consider the ways in which educational policies and institutions today enable or obstruct young people who are immigrant English-language learners as they seek to cross cultural and educational borders. Contrasting a class action suit in California protesting high stakes testing that will significantly limit graduation rates, and an ethnographic analysis of the international high schools in which immigrant youth engage with cultural and educational depth and support and graduate at exceptional rates, this article challenges the current policy climate in which immigrant youth are increasingly under siege and at risk of being multiply undocumented. In the spirit of protest, we trace the many sites of resistance and possibility dotting the nation, in which educators, communities, families, advocates, and youth are demanding educational access and justice.