Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
Academic success is now coupled with social media engagement. Social media has become so normalized in the academy that absent a carefully curated social media presence, scholars risk being seen as unscholarly, unproductive, and unpopular. This article lays bare the pressures, mechanisms, and monstrosities of using social media to promote scholarship. We argue that the widespread adoption of social media outpaces critical attention to its ethics and wonder about the future of public scholarship and the monstrous scholarly selves we are becoming. Thinking of monstrosity, with Krecˇicˇ and Žižek, as the preontological domain that rests beneath society and constitutes alterity and otherness, we ask what kinds of #scholarfamousmonsters we want to be, become, and promote in the digital era.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
Racial inequalities in education may be exacerbated by teachers’ lack of confidence about working with students from racial and ethnic backgrounds different to their own. Although intergroup contact experiences typically enhance people’s self-efficacy about navigating cross-group interactions, very little work has explored such trends among teachers. Across two cross-sectional studies and one preregistered repeated measures experiment (N = 1,608), we reveal that (a) White teachers’ interracial contact experiences predicted a stronger sense of self-efficacy about cross-race engagement; (b) White teachers generally showed a preference for working in a majority-White school compared to a majority-Black school, but this bias was attenuated by teachers’ interracial contact experiences; and (c) the link between cross-race friendships and desire to work in the majority-Black school was mediated by a greater sense of self-efficacy.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
Creating equitable classrooms is difficult for many preservice teachers. Addressing this challenge includes helping them understand what equity is and recognizing how teaching practices contribute to (in)equitable learning environments. This investigation describes how one teacher education program approaches helping students by employing an Indigenous epistemology, Nahui Ollin, to develop students’ equity literacy. This work describes how students perceive understanding of equity literacy to be assisted by studying Nahui Ollin.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
Students with and without disabilities may be educated across various service delivery models (SDMs): general education, cotaught, pull-out, and self-contained. Still, evidence for their relative effectiveness at scale remains limited. Using longitudinal administrative data from Indiana, we measured the effect of different SDMs on test scores, attendance, and disciplinary incidents. We leveraged within-student variation in SDM assignments and differences across students, applying student fixed effects and lagged outcomes models, which bound the causal effect within a narrow, policy-relevant range. Students with disabilities performed better in less restrictive environments, although the magnitude was often modest and varied across SDMs. Coteaching had a positive impact on students without disabilities. This work contributes to our understanding of inclusive practices’ effectiveness as experienced statewide.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
In recent years, several states have expanded a new publicly funded learning option: Transitional Kindergarten (TK). TK bridges prekindergarten and kindergarten in its eligibility, requirements, and design. Using Michigan as a case study, we examine TK’s fit in the early learning landscape. Broadly, we find TK in Michigan reduces some socioeconomic gaps in early program enrollment while exacerbating others. Specifically, districts with more White and fewer economically disadvantaged students are more likely to offer TK. Among preschool-age children, noneconomically disadvantaged children are more likely to enroll in TK; among kindergarten-age children, take-up is similar by family income. Finally, some children enroll in TK instead of other public options, but there is no evidence that public slots decline overall.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
The widespread adoption of restorative practices (RP) in U.S. schools to address inequities has been significant. However, the existing literature on RP lacks research measuring its impact on genderqueer students. This study explores the experiences of genderqueer students in Grades 3 through 12 compared to cisgender students in a school district implementing RP, focusing on RP circle experiences (N = 1,751). Our findings indicate that genderqueer students face more discrimination and lower levels of belonging, respect, and adult support compared to their cisgender peers. They are also less likely to feel heard or safe during RP talking circles. Stemming from these findings, the article concludes by discussing implications, such as advancing LGBTQ critical consciousness for RP circle facilitators; facilitating circles utilizing principles of anti-oppression; hiring and retaining critically conscious administrators, educators, and staff who identify as genderqueer; gathering school climate data that specifically ask about microaggressions and discrimination; facilitating restorative conferences between impacted gender students and offending adults; and addressing discrimination through a multitiered system of support framework. We hope that our findings and implications assist those educators with a heart for social justice to implement RP circles with a more equity-centered, radical approach that more intentionally promotes inclusive school climates for genderqueer individuals.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
In scholarly research, racial categories are typically taken for granted. However, race categories vary over time and geography and reflect the social beliefs of the people who use them. Informed by quantitative critical race theory analysis, we interrogate how race categories align (or not) with 24,000 U.S. higher education students’ responses to ethnoracial identification questions. Students provide a wide range of ethnoracial categorizations when prompted with an open-ended instrument: ethnic/national identities, panethnic identities, resistance to categorization, unknown origins, and racially mixed identities. Quantitative methodologists recommend that survey researchers not use a write-in or open-ended format for racial identification because it introduces error and ambiguity. However, students’ responses show that the race categories provided were not exhaustive or mutually exclusive. This work has policy significance because in early 2024, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget recommended that federal agencies provide respondents with a write-in box and detailed categories when collecting race data.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
Pathological thinking surrounding disenfranchised and marginalized communities remains a problem in education policy, popular discourse, and research on marginalized communities. Scholars employ a host of frameworks to challenge such pathological thinking, often through the language of deficits. We argue that in an effort to refute pathological thinking about marginalized communities, counter-deficit frameworks potentially rely on a different logic of pathology through an overreliance on person-centered rationales for educational success and educational inequity. Specifically, this essay demonstrates how scholars, if they are not careful, can fall into two different pathology traps: (a) the “high achievers trap” and (b) the “blaming teachers trap.” We offer guidance of how to avoid such traps through careful attention to structural forces of oppression.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
The surveillance and securitization of schools has transformed over the last decade to include predictive analytics and algorithms. In Florida, for example, the Pasco Sheriff’s Office used school record data sets to identify and monitor youth they believed were “destined for a life of crime.” Yet the extent of big data policing as a model of surveillance and control in American public schools has not been addressed in meaningful ways by schools and the courts. This essay argues the burden and risk on student Fourth Amendment and privacy rights place an obligation on the government to actively protect student data and make big data policing efforts transparent. Future research is critical to address the systemic inequities that policing and surveillance have exacerbated on America’s youth.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
This brief uses national data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to investigate deficit beliefs, or beliefs that students’ academic underperformance is primarily attributable to deficiencies in their home environments, among high school math teachers. Descriptive results reveal that students in low-level math courses have teachers with more deficit beliefs. Regression results show that net of extensive control variables for both student and teacher characteristics, having a math teacher with stronger deficit beliefs is significantly and negatively associated with students’ math performance. However, this negative association is not more pronounced for youth from minoritized and low socioeconomic status backgrounds.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
In this essay, we explored the feasibility of utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) for qualitative data analysis in equity-focused research. Specifically, we compare thematic analyses of interview transcripts conducted by human coders with those performed by GPT-3 using a zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting strategy. Our results suggest that the AI model, when provided with suitable prompts, can proficiently perform thematic analysis, demonstrating considerable comparability with human coders. Despite potential biases inherent in its training data, the model was able to analyze and interpret the data through social justice perspectives. We discuss the applications of integrating AI into qualitative research, provide code snippets illustrating the use of GPT models, and highlight unresolved questions to encourage further dialogue in the field.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
Education has long been an area of political debate in the United States, with politicians and policymakers advocating for distinct societal and/or individual purposes of K–12 education. In this article, we examine the public opinion on the purpose of education, and we explore whether this political divide on the purpose of education is also represented in the broad public opinion. For a sample 19,032 U.S. respondents, we test whether citizens’ partisanship corresponds with their opinions on seven educational purposes. We observe that the public opinion represents a multifunctional view on education and that some but rather small differences relate to partisanship. We frame these findings in the existing literature and postulate avenues for further research.

Educational Researcher, Volume 54, Issue 1, Page 56-60, January/February 2025.
Recent data show rising suicidality among high school girls. We posit this increase may be related to an overlooked factor: more girls identifying as LGBQ. Using four cohorts of national Youth Risk Behavior Survey data (N = 22,562 females, N = 22,130 males), we found that LGBQ identification among females rose from 15% in 2015 to 34% in 2021. LGBQ females consistently reported higher suicidality, although rates remained stable within both LGBQ and heterosexual groups. The rise in females’ suicidality may stem from social pressures faced by LGBQ youth. Male suicidality and LGBQ identification showed smaller changes. More support for LGBQ students is essential to address this trend.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
Despite the growing availability of classroom measures, such measures rarely attended to the embodied nature of learning. This article describes the collaborative development of a practical measure to capture embodied participation in mathematics classrooms with four elementary school teachers—working with students at the intersections of multiply marginalized identities: students of color, emergent bilinguals, and students with disabilities—who informed the measure design and ensured that the data were actionable in their contexts. This article contributes to existing research on classroom measures by highlighting the value of attending to embodied learning through multiple modalities and representations of student participation. We further highlight how such a measure provides practical insights into participation that extend beyond verbal only measures.

Educational Researcher, Ahead of Print.
A controversial, equity-focused mathematics reform in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) featured delaying Algebra I until ninth grade for all students. This study examines student-level longitudinal data on mathematics course-taking across successive cohorts of SFUSD students who spanned the reform’s implementation. We observe large changes in ninth and 10th grades (e.g., delaying Algebra I and geometry). Participation in Advanced Placement (AP) math initially fell 15% (6 percentage points), driven by declines in AP calculus and among Asian/Pacific Islander students. However, growing participation in acceleration options attenuated these reductions. Large ethnoracial gaps in advanced math course-taking remained.