Education Commons^™

Magnet Schools Promote Diversity, Opportunity, Equity, Achievement, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Thomas J. Shields

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

Last spring, nearly 400 people from across the metro area came together over two days at the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University to learn about our region’s troubled public school history … and how to move forward.

Indicative of significant and communitywide investment, conference attendees expressed interest in solutions that would promote school diversity, equity and opportunity in central Virginia. These included innovative solutions and tested strategies for addressing educational inequalities both within and across area school systems.

One of the key solutions discussed during the conference was the establishment of regional magnet schools. These programs are typically …

Tracking Pod's Engagement With Diversity: A Content Analysis Of To Improve The Academy And Pod Network Conference Programs From 1977 To 2011, Stacy E. Grooters

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This study examines the degree to which sessions from the annual Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network Conference and articles from To Improve the Academy engage questions of diversity. The titles and abstracts of 3,946 conference sessions and 560 journal articles were coded for presence and type of diversity. A significant variation in inclusion of diversity over time was found for the conference sessions (p < 0.001) but not the journal articles. Overall, the findings suggest that the organization has been inconsistent in its scholarly engagement with diversity and should work to encourage more regular engagement with diversity by its members.