This article considers placement in the least restrictive environment (LRE) for students with disabilities in the United States, discussing the LRE concept as it has developed in other contexts and its application to special education. The article describes the legislation that embeds the LRE principle in the delivery of special education services and details its origin, then covers developments in the courts both before and after the legislation was enacted. Finally, the article takes up ongoing controversies over LRE, including whether the principle has been taken too far, problems with implementation, and how the LRE principle relates to issues regarding racial segregation in the schools.
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Least Restrictive Environment and Students With Disabilities in the United States
Mark C. Weber
Article
Religious Expression in Schools in the United States
Ann E. Blankenship-Knox
In public schools in the United States, the landscape of religious expression is an ever-changing terrain where individual rights intersect with institutional responsibilities. Students attending public schools enjoy First Amendment rights, including the freedom to exercise their religion and express their beliefs. While the Establishment Clause prohibits schools from endorsing specific religions, students can engage in non-disruptive religious activities on campus. These activities may encompass praying, distributing religious literature, and forming religious clubs, provided they are initiated by students rather than sponsored by the school. Striking a balance is crucial, and administrators must navigate potential conflicts by ensuring that any restrictions are content-neutral and applied consistently to all expressive activities. Public school employees face more nuanced boundaries concerning religious expression due to their roles as government representatives. The Establishment Clause restricts employees from using their positions to endorse or promote religious beliefs. Despite this, employees retain the right to practice their religion both inside and outside the school environment. Teachers, for example, can address students’ questions about religion within an academic context but must avoid proselytizing or imposing personal beliefs. Schools are expected to accommodate reasonable requests for religious practices, such as prayer breaks or dress code modifications, unless they create an undue burden on the school’s operations.
Public schools must delicately balance upholding individuals’ constitutional rights with maintaining a neutral and inclusive educational environment. The Supreme Court has, for decades, grappled with what test(s) to apply when analyzing alleged Establishment Clause violations. Two of the three tests relied upon, in some fashion or another, have been cast aside by the current Supreme Court. They have instead opted to rely on an analysis focusing on the intent of the founding fathers. What appears to be a huge win for advocates of prayer in public schools will surely be a continued legal battle for decades to come.
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Resisting Anti-Black Racism in U.S. Schools and Implications for Global Leadership
Jennifer Grace
The legacy of European colonialism and White supremacy in the field of education persists, affecting countless lives across the African and Black diaspora. Anti-Blackness is a particularly insidious form of racism that has undergirded racial inequity and the quality of life for Black people throughout the world. This article provides an overview from 18th-century chattel slavery anti-literacy laws to present-day curriculum bans, exclusionary discipline, disparate outcomes, and how anti-Black racism has been embedded in the fabric of educational institutions. In addition, a discussion of how anti-Blackness operates in local contexts globally is included, with recommendations for leaders abroad. Collectively, educational leaders are uniquely positioned to disrupt centuries of deeply rooted systems of inequity impacting Black people throughout the world. Educational leaders are urged to engage in racial literacy, critical reflective praxis, and institutional anti-racism to disrupt centuries-old structures that perpetuate racial inequity.
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The Impact of COVID-19 Laws, Policies, and Practices on Educational Equity
Nate Hutcherson, Sergio D. Barragán, Shadman Islem, and Raquel Muñiz
K–12 education and higher education in the United States were drastically affected by COVID-19. Local, state, and federal leaders’ decisions in response to the pandemic were meant to protect the health of their communities. These decisions included school closures across the country, vaccine mandates in some states, and bans on vaccine mandates in other states. Additionally, educational institutions made adaptations to education that resulted in widespread differences in students’ educational environments. These adaptations included remote learning in the K–12 and higher education contexts, changes to student support services, and changes in standardized testing requirements for higher education admissions applications.
The result of these decisions and adaptations were educational laws, policies, and practices that were not equally enjoyed and experienced by all students but rather further exacerbated preexisting educational disparities. Marginalized students, including low-income individuals, students of color, first-generation students, and English Learners, already faced significant barriers to fully engage in their education prepandemic. The inequities of pandemic responses only served to further entrench these disadvantages. These efforts raise important considerations for future research, policy, and practice that can curb the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and future crises.
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Policies, Educational Reforms, and the Everyday Making of School in Argentina
Silvia Grinberg
School reform in Argentina has undergone major changes as a result of two structural transformations of the educational system in the last 40 years. There have been, and continue to be, multiple lines of action involving laws, programs, and policies that affect every aspect of school life. Layers of reform play out in the everyday life of schools, both as lofty statements about education and as large and small everyday acts. Despite disgruntled demands, nostalgia, and counter-reforms, it is crucial to pay attention to the everyday making of an institution, a making that takes place in the muck of history. Each of the programs, policies, regulations, and laws is engraved in this muck as a kind of sediment in a palimpsest-like mechanism where traces of the previous reform remain. These reforms, especially their impact on the life of institutions, remain a black box. The key to a different way of conceiving educational policy and reform lies in the everyday and in listening carefully to events as mundane as they are outlandish. It is a matter of patching things together in the everyday making of schools and their actors, which is marked by crisis, fragility, and precariousness.
Article
Teaching Climate Justice Education Holistically in Schools
Robert B. Stevenson, Hilary Whitehouse, and Ellen Field
Climate change education in schools has shifted over the last decade from being given little or no attention, to being narrowly confined to science and geographical education, and to receiving increased attention across the globe within educational policy, curriculum design, teaching practice, and research endeavors. The growing calls for more expansive climate change education internationally respond to the “unprecedented” experiences of record heat, cold, fire, drought, famine, and flood that are now commonly lived and intensely felt across the globe, making climate change an urgent, disruptive, and embodied phenomenon.
We previously described climate change education as “learning in the face of risk, uncertainty and rapid change.” Unfortunately, the risks have intensified to a full-blown crisis. The year 2023 was the hottest year on record. Within the timeframe of this publication, the Paris Agreement guardrail of 1.5°C will likely be exceeded. Young people are unlikely to experience a stable, Holocene-type atmosphere in their lifetimes.
Today’s youth are acutely aware they will bear the most significant impacts of the climate crisis and will be responsible for extensive climate mitigation and adaptation, especially in the face of the limited actions of governments and corporations to substantially reduce carbon emissions. This reality exposes the intergenerational injustice of the rapidly changing climate, but it also exposes other injustices owing to economic inequalities within countries and between developed and developing countries, as well as across geographic locations that are more affected by sea-level rises, extreme heat, or climate extremes that disrupt economic livelihoods and well-being. As a result of the recognition of these injustices, there has been an increasing shift in the nomenclature in research literature as well as in youth climate movements and projects, from climate change education to a more holistic idea of climate justice education. Both research and youth climate movements have drawn attention to the importance of education encompassing matters of intergenerational, sociocultural, economic, and political justice as well as confronting the emotional issues generated by the threats and occurrence of climate disasters. Many conceptions of climate justice education embrace the cognitive, affective, behavioral, and civic action domains of learning.
For young people and their teachers in formal education, collective student engagement is of prime importance. The most effective scale for taking action for climate mitigation, resilience, and adaptation is recognized at the community level. Schools are places and spaces for materially positive learning actions within communities and, as such, powerful places to drive local action. Although climate disruption is a peril at the global scale, effective climate education and action tends to be at the local scale.
Article
Literacies in India
Radha Iyer
Literacy, defined as the ability to read and write, has had a long history in India; while the oral tradition existed for centuries, writing was introduced in the later Vedic period. The colonial period brought about mass education, English as the medium of instruction, and textbook-oriented literacy that led to the disintegration of the Indigenous education system. Postindependence concerted efforts have been undertaken to improve literacy for all age groups. Currently, various schemes and programs are reflective of the nation’s aim to be fully literate. Nevertheless, the objective has been deterred by caste, class, and poverty. Universalization of education, the Total Literacy Campaign, and the Right to Education have been significant aspects of five year plans since their inception in 1951 until the last five year plan that ended in 2017; these have ensured that literacy rates progressed from 12% to 75% in the past 70 years of independence. Despite these worthwhile steps and progress, universal literacy in India is a long-awaited aim.
Article
Symbiosis of Teacher Leadership and Professional Learning Communities
Tengku Faekah Tengku Ariffin, Mohammad Noman, and Yusoff Mohd Suhaili
The professional learning community (PLC) has established itself as a form of teacher professional development embedded in the work of teachers. Although it has been discussed in the literature for a considerable period of time, the concept has not been delivered in practice effectively enough to be widely accepted as a significant contributor to teacher leadership and development. The need for the proper enhancement of PLC practices is thus justified in the increasingly challenging world of the teaching profession. Teacher leadership can play an essential role in strengthening PLC implementation in the school setting. When teacher leaders play their roles in the PLC setting, they are able to drive PLC and help other teachers improve their instruction and bring about changes in student achievements. PLC is instrumental in developing teacher leadership within the schools. Teachers who are informally regarded as mentors and guide others voluntarily will develop a sense of efficacy and confidence. These teachers are leaders in the making. Because PLC and teacher leadership exist in a symbiotic relationship wherein both support each other, schools need to remove hurdles from implementing PLC and teacher leadership and support their mutual development.
Article
Translanguaging and EFL Teaching
Zhongfeng Tian and Wei Li
Translanguaging is the capacity multilingual language users have to draw on different linguistic, cognitive, semiotic, and modal resources to make meaning and make sense, transcending the boundaries between named languages and between language and other meaning- and sense-making resources. The 21st century is a postmultilingualism era that is no longer about the harmonious parallel existence of multiple languages but about the infiltration, transgression, and subversion of boundaries that are artificially and ideologically set between languages, races, and nations. No single nation or community can claim sole ownership, authority, and responsibility for any particular language, including English, and boundaries between named languages, between languages and other communicative means, and the relationship between language and the nation-state are being constantly reassessed, broken, or adjusted. Translanguaging captures such changing dynamics and highlights the language user’s agency in exploiting their communicative repertoire holistically and in an integrated and coordinated way. When applied to English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching and learning, translanguaging demands that not just the first language but the learner’s repertoire be visible and audible in the classroom, aiming to foster a more inclusive, equitable learning environment, especially for minoritized language speakers. Translanguaging as a pedagogical approach has been shown to deepen students’ understanding of certain content and topics, facilitate the learners’ participation and knowledge coconstruction with one another, develop their English language and literacy skills, and enhance their multilingual and multicultural awareness.
Article
The Mnemonic Effects of Retrieval Practice
Cristina D. Zepeda, Emily Een, and Andrew C. Butler
Retrieval practice refers to the act of retrieving information from memory with the intent to promote learning. Although retrieval practice is often operationalized as taking a test, it can occur through many different types of learning activities (e.g., answering a question posed by a teacher, working on a practice problem, writing an essay, using flashcards, having a group discussion). Research on retrieval practice has a long history, but there has been a surge of interest since 2005 in the phenomenon. This large body of research has shown that retrieval practice produces superior long-term retention and transfer of learning to new contexts relative to activities that are predominantly used to study material (e.g., listening to a lecture, reading a textbook, watching a video)—a finding that is commonly referred to as “the testing effect.” Importantly, it is the act of retrieving that causes learning; such direct effects of retrieval practice can be distinguished from its indirect effects on learning. These indirect effects include: providing formative feedback to the learner, incentivizing study, and reducing test anxiety. Research has also identified several factors that moderate the effects of retrieval practice, including experimental design, test format, provision of feedback, and retention interval. In addition, there is ample evidence to support the conclusion that the benefits of retrieval practice are highly generalizable across learner populations, materials and skills, settings, and outcome measures. Given that the mnemonic benefits of retrieval practice are robust and generalize broadly, it is widely recommended as a learning strategy for students and a pedagogical technique for educators.
