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Current scholarship emphasizes the adoption of "zero-tolerance" policies as the cause of the punitive turn in school discipline. The focus on "zero tolerance," however, has obscured how and for what offenses schools most commonly issue suspensions, namely non-attendance and "classroom disruption." Using Boston as case study, this article situates the formation of the contemporary school-prison nexus in the decades following the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education and argues the preservation of educator discretion shaped its structure. Beginning in the decade prior to Boston's court-ordered desegregation, it analyzes how white Bostonians racialized conceptions of safety and crime to sustain segregation and how that rhetoric shaped the city's preparations for and implementation of desegregation. It examines how police conduct combined with educators' disciplining power repurposed the racist logics undergirding segregation to make schools active institutions in spurring carceral expansion and later mass incarceration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a version of Professor Smith's Presidential Address as delivered at the annual meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society in Boston, March 2022. Most sociologists go into the field hoping our work will help address the inequalities or injustices we study, but academic institutions and careers strongly guide most of our work away from the engagement needed to have such impacts. With others, I argue for changes in academic careers and institutions to better recognize, promote, and reward publicly engaged sociology, which would help academia honor its social contract. I briefly engage Burawoy's concept of public sociology, then propose types of publicly engaged sociology that align with how many sociologists do such work: Reframing/Debunking Sociology, Institutionally Engaged Sociology, and Community Engaged Sociology. Next, I analyze several obstacles to publicly engaged—and especially community engaged—sociology, including epistemic assumptions and evaluative practices stemming from instrumental positivism, belief in a canonical Hawthorne effect as a clean experimental finding, and a bias against research that helps research participants or partners. Finally, I offer advice and strategies to younger sociologists wishing to do such work and recommend ways academic institutions and practices could better support publicly engaged sociology, including by training students and faculty in how to do it, creating a Journal of Publicly Engaged Sociology, and amending ASA's Code of Ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration is more than evolutionary advantage, it is good business and good for learning. It is through collaboration that we open new doors, create new options, and develop unforeseen opportunities. More than simple information exchange, collaboration allows the joint creation of new value and creates multiple layers of interpersonal connection and interaction leading to enhanced learning. This newly created value has been termed the "collaborative advantage." The headache group at the C. Besta Institute in Milan, Italy, and the John Graham Headache Center in Boston, MA, have begun a collaboration in clinical Headache Medicine. The history and nature of the process and early results are discussed. Programs like this could help advance the field of headache medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like African Americans, Latinos struggled to navigate Boston's segregated, inequitable school system during the 1960s and 1970s. Latino children confronted many obstacles including language barriers, inadequate teaching and counseling, dilapidated buildings and overcrowded classrooms, limited curriculums, and severe shortages of materials. They also endured hostility and violence from their peers, dropped out at alarmingly high rates, and were systematically excluded from school for a host of reasons. Despite a rich history of Latino organizing around these issues, Boston's historical narrative and "busing crisis" framework furthers a black-white binary that renders Latinos invisible. I disrupt this by recovering the role of Latinos in mobilizations for reform in Boston Public Schools. This essay examines the emergence of the Latino educational movement during the 1960s and 1970s, centered on ideas of community control and the right to bilingual education. I draw attention to the experiences of Latino children with ambiguous racial identities, shedding light on complexities that are often overlooked in dominant black-white desegregation narratives. I highlight the agency of ordinary Latino parent activists who worked strategically in and outside the school system, using numerous tactics in the pursuit of educational justice. I focus particularly on the leading role of working-class Latina mothers, who developed their own educational programs outside of school, petitioned the school system for reform, staged public protests, and sought legal appeals. Though interethnic conflicts and divisions emerged, they did not alter the movement's primary aims, which remained sharply focused on the protection and expansion of bilingual education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, "I didn't want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston." Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston's civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children's literature set during or inspired by Boston's desegregation busing plan reflect and respond to the ongoing battle over the history and memory of Boston's civil rights movement and its enduring racial legacy: Busing Brewster, an illustrated children's book for young readers, written by Richard Michelson and illustrated by R. G. Roth; and Gold Dust, a middle-grade novel for adolescents by Chris Lynch. Both works offer representations of an overtly racist past, produced in a historical moment when prevailing ideologies of color blindness and postracialism suggest not only that racism is passe, but that any attempt to redress past racism that takes race into account is itself racist and unjust. Busing Brewster and Gold Dust offer equivocal reflections on urban decline and racial transformations at the turn of the twenty-first century. Both works have as much to tell us about the historical memory of Boston's desegregation efforts as they do about contemporary understandings of race and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boston's long Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century, before the infamous busing crisis, has not received nearly as much attention as the school desegregation period that was ushered in by Federal court order in 1974. While the story of Boston's busing crisis is well known, my goal is to place that moment within the context of a longer freedom struggle in Boston and highlight the city's history of racial inequality and segregation. By looking at both the nineteenth-century origins of legal discrimination in Boston and the activism during the four decades before the 1970s, I reconstruct these humble but effective efforts in which activists focused mainly on issues of employment, housing, educational equality, and quality of life. The goal of this essay, then, is to contextualize the busing conversation and reconstruct the political context in which black Bostonians embarked on various campaigns to reclaim the legacy of freedom and equality established earlier, in the nineteenth century. In that sense, I argue that Boston was not simply a "southern space" ensconced in the North, but rather was the original template for segregation in the nation, as cited in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).[1] The issues engaged by Boston's freedom movement, from de facto school segregation to employment discrimination, challenge many prevailing popular assumptions about postwar black freedom struggles in other cities. This article aims to investigate the origins of that movement and what gave rise to the unique nature of civil rights organizing activities in Boston before Busing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a special issue rethinking the Boston "Busing Crisis" seeks to examine how the misleading 'busing crisis' narrative took hold as a way to understand Boston race relations. The piece examines the long struggle for school desegregation in Boston and the myriad of tactics used to deflect and delegitmize that struggle through frames of "busing," "neighborhood schools," "choice," and "cultural deprivation" which provided a palatable way for Bostonians to explain and hide school inequalities. Finally, the piece considers the role of the media in legitimating these white framings and delegitimizing the urgency of the struggle against school inequality in the Cradle of Liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article includes portions of a report on the structure, governance, operations, and effectiveness of the Boston School Committee that was commissioned by the Boston Municipal Research Bureau in 1980. The passages provide an overview of the mandate, background, and recommendations, examining how a set of prominent professionals and citizens viewed the problem facing school department governance, including its isolation and the longstanding credibility gap fueled by patronage politics. It also looks at continued tensions between "equality" and "quality," which occupied the heart of court-ordered desegregation; rising demands on a system that lacked the capacity to serve a broad array of students; and the continued problems of securing financial support. Also presented is a thumbnail history of public schooling in Boston that traces mid-twentieth-century efforts by black parents and other reformists to secure civil rights and a decent education for all of Boston's children and shows the evolution of advocacy for better management and cost-effectiveness that occurred alongside cries for more equitable and just performance. It concludes by showing the challenges facing an entrenched school bureaucracy confronting modern demands for educational, social, management, and fiscal accountability--challenges that continue to be apparent in 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pursuit of high-quality schools for their children is one of the main factors motivating middle-class families to exit urban communities. This study draws on interviews with middle-class mothers in Boston who have opted instead to stay in the city to explore how they evaluated their local public elementary schools. Specifically, I examine how some middle-class mothers deploy their cultural capital in the process of embracing a choice that others may see as risky or surprising. Findings reveal that respondents’ awareness of and confidence in their own cultural capital—in particular, their ability to provide enriching learning opportunities outside the classroom—shape how they think about the kind of school their children need and enable them to downplay the relevance of the district’s standardized test scores. This, in turn, allows them to privilege other aspects of the educational experience when deciding among public school options. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the conflict between charter schools and their local school districts in Boston, Massachusetts. Topics discussed include attempts by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to broker nonaggression pacts and facilitate cross-sector partnerships, expansion of the Recovery School District (RSD), agreement between Boston Public Schools and the Boston Alliance for Charter Schools and the type of charter schools operating in Boston.

This article examines the idea of loss in relation to elementary education. The goal is to show the importance of teachers attending to their students' individual experience and, in particular, to the ways schools can make children feel lost or found. The article relies primarily on classroom narratives, focusing heavily on stories about one student with a diagnosed learning disability. The author invokes psychoanalytic theory to help explain the connection between mourning and the ways children behave in school and argues for the significance of teachers examining their own relationships with students and learning. The article also aims to critique the role of audit culture in education by showing how it simplifies the way students and teachers experience each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small German programs need to reach out to first-year students in order to expand the pool of potential majors and minors and to increase program visibility on campus. This article demonstrates how an interdisciplinary Seminar for Freshmen on Vienna and Berlin can be used to introduce students to the study of the German-speaking world by comparing the two capital cities with regard to culture, history, lifestyle, and politics. In contrast to the norm in many programs, Austria is given equal status in this exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes public perceptions of Boston's magnet school program. Typically evaluated in terms of their impact on racial integration, magnet schools also were designed to improve the tarnished image of the Boston school system. While promoting voluntary integration at a handful of schools, the magnet program struggled to change the reputation of public education in the city. Boston's magnet schools found themselves perched precariously between conflicting and equally-problematic perceptions. To the extent that they were perceived to be elite enclaves, Boston magnet schools became potent symbols of inequality. To the extent that magnet schools were not perceived to be academically superior, they could never encourage integration nor become symbols of the potential of Boston public schools. Illustrating the dilemma presented by these contradictory perceptions, the history of Boston magnet schools suggests that efforts towards racial integration must be intertwined with campaigns for increasing educational achievement citywide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship of action, experience, behavior, and technology with environmental education. Nowadays, many people are not taking action to promote environmental education. Technologically mediated environmental educational experiences concerns itself with values and it is also mediated by other means. The Roxbury Environmental Empowerment Project (REEP) is a program of the Alternatives for Community (ACE) in Boston, Massachusetts that emphasizes action competence approaches for environmental education.

Increasingly, discussions of education reform end up in debate over how much money will be required to fund it. Although educators often argue for more funds and critics counter that school spending is already at an all-time high, neither group has looked systematically at the use of existing resources. This analysis addresses how school systems might reconsider their use of teachers, their most important and expensive resource, to support reform. A case study of Boston Public Schools shows how the specialization and fragmentation of teaching resources reduced the individual attention most students received and limited a school's flexibility to respond to student needs. The analysis develops three measures that might be used as indicators of the size of opportunity for freeing teaching re- sources. It identifies four practices that together account for over 40% of Boston's teaching resources and could provide significant opportunity to redirect resources to support reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents news regarding education for gifted children, which includes "Policy and Legislative Issues: Their Effects on Gifted and Talented Students," which is a symposium sponsored by the Association for the Gifted at the Council for Exceptional Children in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Connecting Students to Advanced Courses Online academic course work. Also discussed is the book "Everyday Anti-racism: Getting Real About Race in School," edited by Mica Pollock.