A Tale of Three Cities: Defining Urban Schools Within the Context of Varied Geographic Areas

What constitutes an urban school? This question has confounded social researchers and educators who often limit definitions to population data. H. Richard Milner suggested a framework for defining urban schools that includes population data as well as the racial and social context of schools. This article applied Milner’s model to school districts in New York, Nebraska, and New Mexico which exemplified Milner’s categories of urban schools: urban intensive, urban emergent, and urban characteristic. Application of the framework to the districts presents a model for teacher educators to deliver two important components of preservice preparation. First, the model can assist preservice teachers to challenge their existing perceptions of urban schools. Second, establishing a framework provides teacher educators the opportunity to guide preservice teachers to view urban schools through a Critical Race Theory lens. Through this lens, preservice teachers can begin to realize the impact of systemic racism within education

More than an Anniversary - A preview of William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resiliency, and Recovery in New Orleans

William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resiliency, and Recovery in New Orleans will be released by Peter Lang in 2020. The book examines issues related to public education through events at the iconic William Frantz Public School, one of the first New Orleans public schools to be desegregated in 1960. The book covers important topics such as the resegregation of public schools, systemic racism, poverty, school accountability movements, and proliferatoin of charter schools

The Design of an Online Social Network Site for Emergency Management: A One Stop Shop

Web 2.0 is rapidly creating new opportunities for communication and collaboration. Part of this explosion is the increase in popularity and use of Social Network Sites (SNSs) for general and domain-specific use. In the emergency domain there are a number of websites including wikis and SNSs. but they stand as silos in the field, unable to allow for cross-site collaboration. In this paper we describe ongoing design science research to develop and refine guiding principles for the design of an SNS that will bring together emergency domain professionals in a “one-stop-shop.” We surveyed emergency professionals who study crisis information systems, to ascertain potential functionalities of such an SNS. Preliminary results suggest that there is a need for the envisioned SNS. Future research will continue to explore possible solutions to issues addressed in this paper

A Wild Distinction: The Metamorphosis of Teacher Identity Through Cognitive Dissonance and Urban Field Experiences

Teacher identity is not a common construct - it is used in different ways, by different people, and in different contexts. Yet the process of developing teacher identity as beginning professionals is critical. To paraphrase the word of one pre-service teacher, there is a wild distinction between the identity of a student and the identity of a teacher

A New Orleans community center rises from its ugly history as a segregated school

They were known as “the McDonogh Three,” and unlike many stories of the tumultuous civil rights era, this one has a hopeful ending. On May 4, 2022, Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost are scheduled to cut the ribbons around the front door of the former McDonogh 19 Elementary School. Located in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, the school was the scene of some of the nation’s fiercest anti-integration school battles in the early 1960s. Now named after the three women, the school has been transformed into the TEP Center, whose name consists of the first letters of each woman’s last name. It has been redesigned to include affordable housing and exhibition space focused on the civil rights era and the three women’s stories

The Legacy of William Frantz Public School: Commemoration vs. Celebration

Sixty years ago, Ruby Bridges, a Black first-grade student, entered the all-White William Frantz Public School (WFPS). Her entry into WFPS represented a massive transformation in public education in the United States and embedded the school in the U.S. civil rights movement. Fifteen years ago, following Hurricane Katrina, the rapid increase in charter schools in New Orleans centered WFPS in a second transformation, the movement to reform public education. In addition to these two seminal events, a more complete history of WFPS provides justification that these landmark transformations be commemorated rather than celebrated

William Frantz Public School: One School, One Century, Many Stories

William Frantz Public School (WFPS) in New Orleans, Louisiana, played a significant role in the story of desegregation in public K-12 education in the United States. This story began in 1960 when first-grader, Ruby Bridges, surrounded by federal marshals, climbed the steps to enroll as the school’s first Black student. Yet many subsequent stories unfolded within WFPS and offer an opportunity to open the discourse regarding systemic questions facing present-day United States public education - racial integration, accountability, and increasing support for charter schools. In this article, these stories are told first in the context of WFPS and then are connected to parallels found in other schools in New Orleans as well as other urban areas in the United States

Knowledge Seeking and Knowledge Sharing in a nonprofit organizational partner network: a social network analysis

This research empirically examines the online social network of a national, non-profit organization called the national alliance to reduce violence (NARV), non-profit organizations across the US which address the issue of interpersonal violence. As a network of practice, knowledge shared by the non-profit organizations originates across a breadth of experts in the disciplines of advocacy, science, practice and policy. Two problems served as the motivation for this research. First, how does the online network structure support current knowledge contribution and knowledge retrieval within the network? Second, how could the online network structure enhance knowledge contribution and knowledge retrieval to meet the needs of the organization? We acquired network structure and knowledge sharing data through the collection of survey responses from NARV’s membership list. The data were analyzed as a two-mode affiliation network using UCINET, For the first research question, we found that the action groups of research and public awareness are positioned to be strong sources of knowledge contribution within the current network due to the number of nodes with whom they are connected. For the second research question, we identified training and mentoring as the action group from which other nodes desire knowledge