Education Commons^™

Building Civic Capacity: The History & Landscape Of Nyc Integration Activism 2012–2021 [Post-Print], Mira Debs, Molly Vollman Makris, Elise Castillo, Alexander Rodriguez, Ayana Smith, Josephine Steuer Ingall

Faculty Scholarship

Background: New York City is one of the most segregated school districts in the country, but in the last nine years, school integration has moved from being marginal to a central education policy. Existing narratives have emphasized parents, school and political leaders, downplaying the significance of citywide coalitions of activists, especially youth activists.

Purpose: We examine how grassroots activists contributed to transform school integration policy, and the opportunities and challenges as a result through urban regime theory and specifically civic capacity, which highlights how various constituencies build a shared agenda for policy change.

Research Design: Working in partnership with …

Integration Versus Meritocracy? Competing Educational Goals During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Elise Castillo, Molly Vollman Makris, Mira Debs

Faculty Scholarship

Alongside the immediate challenges of operating schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, over the past year, parents, students, and policymakers around the country have also debated equity and access to some of the country’s most elite and segregated public schools. This qualitative case study examines how New York City activists conceptualized educational equity during the pandemic. Conceptually framed by Labaree’s (1997) typology of the three competing purposes of education—democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility—we document different lessons learned from the pandemic by integration activists, who emphasized school integration for democratic equality; and meritocratic activists, who prioritized retaining the existing stratified …

The Relationship Between Work During College And Post College Earnings, Daniel Douglas, Paul Attewell

Faculty Scholarship

© Copyright © 2019 Douglas and Attewell. Prior research suggests that undergraduates employed during term time are less likely to graduate. Using transcript data from a large multi-campus university in the United States, combined with student earnings data from state administrative records, the authors find that traditional-age students who worked for pay during college on average earned more after leaving college than similar students who did not work. This post-college earnings premium is on par with the benefit from completing a degree, even after controlling for demographic and academic achievement characteristics, across various student sub-groups, and including models that account …

Writing Assignments In Epidemiology Courses: How Many And How Good?, Ella August, Karen Burke, Cathy Fleischer, James A. Trostle

Faculty Scholarship

© 2019, Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. Objectives: Schools and programs of public health are concerned about poor student writing. We determined the proportion of epidemiology courses that required writing assignments and the presence of 6 characteristics of these assignments. Methods: We requested syllabi, writing assignments, and grading criteria from instructors of graduate and undergraduate epidemiology courses taught during 2016 or 2017. We assessed the extent to which these assignments incorporated 6 characteristics of effective writing assignments: (1) a description of the purpose of the writing or learning goals of the assignment, (2) a document type (eg, …

Motivating Students To Learn Science: A Physicist’S Perspective, Mark P. Silverman

Faculty Scholarship

The objective of this article is to make explicit some concrete ways in which an accurate perspective of what science is contributes significantly to improving science teaching. Effective science teaching begins with the recognition that for both practising scientists and students the desire to find answers to personally meaningful questions about natural phenomena is the strongest incentive to study science. Instructional methods that nurture and draw upon the curiosity of students have the best chance to motivate students to learn science. Teaching in this way entails helping students 1) to see the conceptual relevance, utility, and aesthetic dimension of what …

Cheating Or Coincidence? Statistical Method Employing The Principle Of Maximum Entropy For Judging Whether A Student Has Committed Plagiarism, Mark P. Silverman

Faculty Scholarship

Elements of correspondence (“coincidences”) between a student’s solutions to an assigned set of quantitative problems and the solutions manual for the course textbook may suggest that the student copied the work from an illicit source. Plagiarism of this kind, which occurs primarily in fields such as the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics, is often difficult to establish. This paper derives an expression for the probability that alleged coincidences in a student’s paper could be attributable to pure chance. The analysis employs the Principle of Maximum Entropy (PME), which, mathematically, is a variational procedure requiring maximization of the Shannon-Jaynes entropy function …

Characteristics And Correlates Of Supportive Peer Mentoring: A Mixed Methods Study [Post-Print], Laura Holt, Melva Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

In this mixed methods study, we employed thematic analysis (TA) to examine peer mentors’ perceptions of benefits, challenges, and roles they experienced as mentors, as well as benefits and challenges experienced by first-year college students. We also utilized quantitative student ratings to classify mentors as highly, moderately, or minimally supportive in order to determine whether any subthemes from the TA appeared more or less frequently across the three groups. Highly supportive mentors reported greater camaraderie among their seminar students and fewer unmotivated students, but also fewer opportunities to provide support to students. Moreover, mentors’ and students’ perceptions in the minimally …

The African University As “Global” University, Isaac Kamola

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Higher Education And World Politics, Isaac Kamola, Neema Noori

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Contra Viento Y Marea (Against Wind And Tide): Building Civic Identity Among Children Of Emigration In El Salvador, Andrea E. Dyrness

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines contrasting approaches to citizenship education in two schools in San Salvador, El Salvador, in the face of highly visible transnational migration. I argue that while transnational realities challenge education for democratic citizenship, educational processes that enable students to interrogate their own transnational realities—in particular, their relationship to macrostructural relations of inequality—facilitate the development of critical, action-oriented civic identities.

Smartchoices: A Geospatial Tool For Community Outreach And Educational Research, Jack Dougherty

Faculty Scholarship

With SmartChoices, a Web-based map and data sorting application, parents in the metropolitan Hartford, CT region can navigate a myriad of school choices for their children. Developed through collaborative work between Jack Dougherty, a professor at Trinity College, students enrolled Dougherty's course, and a local community partner, the site illustrates the power of community-connected teaching and learning.

Research For Change Versus Research As Change: Lessons From A Mujerista Participatory Research Team, Andrea Dyrness

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I aim to further the discussion of engaged research in anthropology and education by examining the unique changes promoted by participatory research in contrast to policy-oriented activist research models. Drawing on my work with Latina immigrant mothers in a school reform movement, I argue for a Latina feminist view of participatory research that illuminates and builds on Latina women's capacities for social critique and transformative resistance.

Teaching By Candlelight, Vijay Prashad

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Global War Against Teachers, Vijay Prashad

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

City-Suburban Desegregation And Forced Choices: A Review Essay Of Susan Eaton's "The Other Boston Busing Story", Dana Banks, Jack Dougherty

Faculty Scholarship

This review essay critically evaluates Susan Eaton's The Other Boston Busing Story, an interview-based study of African American alumni from Boston's METCO voluntary city-to-suburb school desegregation program in the 1970s through the 1990s. The reviewers praise Eaton's richly-textured representations of METCO alumni experiences, but they question whether the evidence supports her major policy claim that nearly all alumni would repeat the program if given the opportunity. Based on the reviewers' parallel study of Hartford's Project Concern alumni, the essay calls attention to "forced choices" faced by many African Americans in these city-suburban programs, and discusses the broader implications for contemporary …

The Art Of The ‘Impossible’: Writing Peace Agreements During War, Andrew Flibbert

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.