Risks and Opportunities for Advancing Educational Equity

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session will address how teachers and educational leaders engage the risks and opportunities for advancing educational equity in America’s diversifying schools. Thirty years after the release of the seminal report A Nation at Risk, which detailed how the achievement of U.S. students severely lagged behind other youth around the world (NCEE, 1983), “at-risk” discourse and academic disparities persists thereby warranting the use of new educational strategies (Author, 2013; Darling-Hammond, 2010). In keeping with the conference theme’s focus on innovation, this session will highlight ways educators can move from notions of risk rooted in cultural differences, low expectations, conflict, and individualistic conceptions of achievement to embrace critical conceptions of collaboration that relate to opportunity, appreciated diversity, engagement, and activism.

Sub Unit

• Division A - Administration / Section 4: School Contexts

Chair

• Camille M. Wilson, University of Michigan

Papers

• A Nation (of Students) at Risk: The Politics of Equity and Achievement in Education Reform - Sonya Douglass Horsford, George Mason University

• Improving Urban Teacher Development Through School-University Partnerships: The Case of South Kilbourne Elementary School - Tambra O. Jackson, University of South Carolina

• Marginalized Sexualities in Public Schools: The Need for Activist Educators - James W. Koschoreck, Northern Kentucky University; James G. Allen, Northern Kentucky University

• New Horizons for Urban Educators Engaging Families in the Post-Civil Rights South - Tondra L. Loder-Jackson, The University of Alabama - Birmingham; Deborah L. Voltz, The University of Alabama - Birmingham