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The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand, from the perspective of students with disabilities, what special education leaders and their respective classroom educators should consider in the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) features and tools to support individualized instruction. This study utilized an immersive and interactive personalized learning environment, virtual reality, to engage students with disabilities as they consider AI tools, features, and supports that are currently needed to enhance their learning experience. The five primary themes for AI integration that building and instructional special education leaders should consider included: (1) response options; (2) content; (3) learning environment and virtual characters; (4) visuals; and (5) sound or auditory supports. As special education leaders seek to determine how best to navigate growing AI tools and how and when to implement, this study, coming from the voice of students with disabilities, offers some immediate and pertinent suggestions within the context of current personalized learning efforts.

The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic extended to the education sector in South Africa, prompting the implementation of preventative measures by the National Coronavirus Command Council. These COVID-19 protocols included the wearing of face masks or face shields, ensuring maximum ventilation, washing of hands, and school attendance routines to deal with overcrowded classrooms, among others. This study aimed to delve into the implementation of COVID-19 protocols in schools, focusing on the strategies utilised and the challenges teachers encountered. Employing a qualitative research methodology within a case study framework, the study involved eight teachers (five male and three female) from four schools in the Sekhukhune District, selected through purposive sampling. Data were elicited through semi-structured interviews to gain a thorough understanding of the phenomenon and coded for anonymity purposes. Aligned with the goal of the study, thematic data analysis was adopted for analysing the data. The findings revealed that teachers faced significant challenges in balancing their responsibilities in implementing COVID-19 protocols alongside making up for lost teaching time. However, alternative strategies were employed by teachers to mitigate this loss including the deployment of assistant teachers to support protocol and assist students with homework, additional security personnel to help guard and control unnecessary school visits, and for teachers to provide supplementary notes and embark on online learning. Recommendations include the increased deployment of support personnel, increased community involvement, training teachers to use online learning platforms, and for the Department of Basic Education to develop a guidance sheet to assist teachers in navigating the challenges of teaching during a pandemic.

The recent expansion in Black suburbanization is the most substantial shift in Black American residential patterns since the Great Migration. It has left Blacks more sorted between urban and suburban neighborhoods across metropolitan areas. This study explores whether this increasing residential stratification is associated with differentiation in Blacks' political views on racialized issues. I first lay out a theory of Black political sorting by place, specifying processes inherent in suburbanization that could lead to opinion stratification between suburban and urban Blacks. This is followed by a descriptive analysis of American Voices Project interviews with suburban and urban Black respondents. The data show Black suburbanization is neither as economically transformative nor politically differentiating as might be expected. Despite subtle opinion differences between suburban and urban respondents, they mostly converge in their bleak assessments of racialized issues.

Policy makers in California intend to provide free preschool to all 4-year-olds solely within public schools by 2026, becoming the nation's second largest single pre-K program in the United States after Head Start. This initiative builds on the state's existing Transitional Kindergarten (TK) option that has served a modest share of 4-year-olds since 2010. Tracing the historical growth in TK enrollments, we find that just 30, mostly urban school districts, enrolled two-fifths of all children served by 2020, responding to funding incentives and displaying stronger organizational capacity. Meanwhile, one-third of California's nearly one thousand districts enrolled fewer than 12 TK children. Black, white, and Asian children remained disproportionally under-enrolled as a share of their respective populations, as enrollments climbed past 90,000 children prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Identifying factors that may explain widely differing gains in TK enrollment, merging education and local census data, we find the suburbs began to catch-up with cities in serving additional 4-year-olds, as well as districts offering school choice (e.g., charter schools). We discuss implications for other nations attempting to rapidly expand preschool, including the inequities that may inadvertently arise.

Suburban inequality is the focus of this double issue of "RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences." This introduction addresses the limited related scholarship, describes how inequality unfolds differently in suburban communities than in urban and rural communities, and draws attention to urgent issues related to stratification between and within suburban communities. We argue that inattention to the study of suburban space, methodological and disciplinary silos, and the changing nature of the suburbs have left large holes in our understanding of how inequality operates. This critical review covers areas such as measurement, forgotten suburban scholarship, demographic change, suburban poverty, social supports, race, immigration, education, politics, policing, and future directions for suburban studies. In our call for resisting amnesia, we also draw attention to forgotten suburban histories and studies of a diverse range of suburban communities.

In the United States, most local jurisdictions are challenged as they seek to maintain fiscal strength. But majority-Black jurisdictions are uniquely burdened due to legacy and contemporary racist and racialized policies and racial capitalism. Leaders in majority-Black locales make harsher budget trade-offs than those in majority-White jurisdictions as they seek to invest in public schools and other public services. I use ethnographic and publicly available data to examine how Prince George's County, Maryland, a majority-Black and middle-class suburban jurisdiction in the Washington, D.C., region, navigates its financial constraints relative to neighboring counties with smaller Black populations. I conclude that Black jurisdictions' fiscal limitations stem from White jurisdictions' not bearing their proportionate share of responsibility for moderate-income and economically distressed households and fallout from uneven regional development, resulting in Black jurisdictions subsidizing White locales.

This article explores how middle-class Asian immigrants disrupted settled geographies and social relations in a high-tech Southern suburb. In a case study of controversies over the redrawing of the Chapel Hill school district attendance boundaries, it asks what middle-class Asian immigrants attempts to navigate the space "between Black and White" reveals about emergent racial and spatial relations in the New South suburbs and the possibilities for advancing more equitable schools and neighborhoods. The case study shows how Asian immigrants struggled to navigate the social, cultural, and educational barriers to organize a united and effective platform, highlighting how new immigrants have challenged old ideas about equitable education policies based on a Black-White binary. But it also showed how their tactics mimicked those of White suburbanites and their resistance to integration, as Asian immigrants rallied around policies that support suburban segregation and inequality and helped to reinforce settled structures of White privilege.

Suburbs were once a haven for advantaged, White families to avoid city life and access high-status schools. This urban-suburban divide, however, has changed in recent decades as suburban communities (and their school districts) have diversified. This study provides an updated cross-sectional portrait of recent racial-ethnic segregation and inequality between and within urban and suburban school districts in U.S. metropolitan areas. We find that the urban-suburban divide remains an important stratifying force--a substantial portion of racial-ethnic residential and school segregation, as well as racial-ethnic inequality in school poverty and test scores, occurs between urban and suburban school districts. Significant segregation and inequality also occur between and within suburban school districts. Suburban stratification is a key feature of the geography of inequality, warranting theoretical and methodological attention.

This article examines the most recent trends on neighborhood racial integration in New York--the country's largest metropolitan area in 2019 with a total population of 19.2 million. We ask how the suburbanization of both immigration and poverty have transformed suburbs over the last two decades. We highlight four findings. First, ethnoracial diversification has led to a significant decline in nonintegrated neighborhoods and a sharp rise in integrated neighborhoods, but such a decline is more dramatic in suburbs than in cities. Second, White-integrated neighborhoods remain the most prevalent form of neighborhood integration in both cities and suburbs. Third, immigrant neighborhoods are more likely to be integrated in both suburbs and cities, but immigration's impact on neighborhood integration in suburbs was stronger in 2000 than in 2019. Finally, the impacts of concentrated immigration, affluence, and disadvantage on neighborhood integration are consistent across suburbs and cities, pointing to convergent processes over time.

The number of Black suburbs has expanded since the 1960s, however, research on gender and how Black women contribute to their formation is understudied. Grounded in an intersectional framework, this article places women at the center of the analysis of Black suburban life. Using a multisite ethnography conducted during the Great Recession, I make a case for a Black diasporic suburb model and analyze the labor and household practices Black women use to sustain their families' suburban lives. This article generates new insights into the heterogeneity of and Black suburbs in general, and the dynamic culture and economies of Black suburban women, in particular. Thus it contributes to new thought in Black feminist geography and the sociology of suburbs.

Rising poverty in suburbs has led to increased interest in how well suburban safety nets function. Apart from public assistance programs, community-based nonprofit health and human service organizations play a central role in suburban efforts to address racial and economic inequalities. Understanding how nonprofit services are distributed across the suburban and urban landscape, therefore, is critical to assessing how communities may be able to address need. In this paper, we examine the presence and volatility of nonprofit health and human service expenditures in suburban and urban counties across the United States from 2000 to 2017. We find the nonprofit safety net to be more responsive in urban centers than in suburban places, and less robust in suburban areas experiencing high rates of poverty or with a larger share of residents who are Black. Nonprofit health and human service spending also appears less countercyclical than is commonly understood. Suburban-urban disparities in nonprofit health and human service spending persist after controlling for several county-level demographic and socioeconomic factors.

Extra-curricular activities, such as playing sport and participating in mentoring programmes, have physical and mental health benefits for individuals. For adolescents particularly, nurturing these interests has the potential for positive outcomes in academic attainment and personal development, an increase to self-esteem, and positive development of relationship skills. This study explored the understanding and attitudes that 11 adolescents, aged 13-16 years, enrolled on a West Midlands-based charity's sports and mentoring programme, had towards their participation through the form of semi-structured focus groups. Thematic Analysis was performed, and three key themes were identified: (i) "Positive changes to their behaviour," (ii) "Connections with the mentors," and (iii) "The difference the mentoring programme has made to their lives." The findings demonstrated that the mentoring programme was beneficial and had favourable impact on the adolescents involved and support the need for such programmes to be further developed and promoted for youth to access.

The home language environment is a significant correlate of early childhood development outcomes; however, less is known about this mechanism in rural and peri-urban China where rates of developmental delay are as high as 52%. This study examines associations between the home language environment and child development in a sample of 158 children (58% boys) aged 18-24 months (M[subscript age] = 21.5) from rural and peri-urban households in Western China. Results show a significant association between adult-child conversation count and language development, suggesting the home language environment may be a mechanism for child development in rural and peri-urban China. 22.5% of the sample were at risk of language delay. Mother's employment and child's age were significant factors in the home language environment.

Inter-district racial and socioeconomic segregation continue to affect students' educational opportunities. Housing mobility programs provide a way for low-income families to access lower-poverty and higher-performing schools in nearby districts. However, changing schools is also disruptive for students. Through interviews with 67 low-income Black youth who moved from Baltimore city into the suburbs with a mobility program, we examine how students' interactions with educators shaped their school transition. Educators who provided academic and interpersonal support helped mitigate disruption by promoting students' sense of school belonging. Yet, we find significant heterogeneity in the support students received as they entered new schools.

The authors analyzed three Advanced Placement U.S. History textbooks' narratives of U.S. 20th century social democratic policies (e.g. New Deal, G.I. Bill, pro-suburbanization policies) using Lipsitz's "possessive investment in whiteness" as a theoretical framework. The authors found texts portrayed the exclusion of Black populations from policy benefits and, to a lesser extent, the disparate benefits conveyed to white communities. However, discussions of racial disparities were segregated from primary narratives that conveyed race neutrality in policy implementation. Additionally, texts obscured white benefits by framing the racist outcomes of the policies as unavoidable. This work contributes to ongoing critical analyses of official curriculum artifacts like textbooks and standards documents by noting how they manage to include, yet exclude, critical, structural understandings of U.S. history.

This article addresses the implications of intersectional qualitative interviews across identity categories of gender, race, ethnicity, and immigrant status. Responding to the research gap on the intersectionality in qualitative interviews and informed by the intersectionality framework, this reflective critical discourse study shares an analysis of two interviews conducted by a female minority researcher. Using the analytic methods of critical discourse analysis, the study examines how the interviewer and interviewee enacted, resisted, and negotiated diverse positionalities and power imbalance within the interview space. Particularly, the analysis demonstrates the researcher's challenges, vulnerability, and mitigating efforts in resisting the powered position taken by the interviewee in light of gender, race, and immigrant status. It also reveals how identity convergence allowed the participants to inhabit the space as collaborative insiders despite the tension in other layers of intersection. Methodological dilemmas and implications for intersectional interviews will be discussed.

The potential spillover effects of the United States' opioid epidemic on children's educational outcomes have received surprisingly little attention from researchers. Accordingly, this study leverages national datasets of county-level opioid prescription rates and public school students' third- to eighth-grade academic achievement to provide the first analysis of associations between community opioid prevalence and children's learning rates. We find that students in counties with higher community opioid presence learn more slowly than peers in counties with low community opioid presence, both in aggregate and across different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups of students. Moreover, within states we observe a small significant negative association between community opioid presence and student learning rates. This association is similar in rural and nonrural communities. These findings underscore the urgency of conceptualizing the opioid epidemic as a community-level crisis, with potentially long-lasting implications for children's future educational attainment and life outcomes.

Like many predominantly Black urban cities, Detroit, Michigan, has experienced significant out-migration among Black residents over the past 30 years. This situation has altered families' relationships to the communities and schools where they have been nurtured or call home. Therefore, this paper examines how seven Black families' place attachments influenced their geographic movement and school choices in the Detroit metropolitan region. Findings show that despite families' movement to surrounding suburbs, varied experiences in Detroit influenced families' decision-making regarding where to live, their search for sociocultural experiences that supported their families holistically, and their perceptions and navigation of municipal boundaries and borders. Families' intention toward maintaining connections with Detroit enact what I term embracing the city. Embracing the city helps consider the importance of socio-spatial ties that persist and orient Black families' community perceptions and school choices in suburban contexts.

A contemporary concern about children's loss of contact with the natural world accompanies an ongoing urbanization and their reduced independent mobility. Children are becoming increasingly reliant on adults in accessing outdoor play and this is giving rise to more such experiences being shared. This research has explored the contemporary contribution of Froebelian holistic pedagogy through which child, adult and natural environment relations are understood as mutually beneficial. An exploration has been undertaken through preschool organized family trips to nature sites in a suburban English context. Sensory ethnography (Pink, 2009) has framed use of child-worn Go-Pros™ on trips by ten children between two and four-years old. This footage has then formed the basis for sensory elicitation interviews with parents in which we revisit shared experience from their child's point-of-view. These parallel perspectives have been analyzed through use of a vocabulary of holistic relations drawn from the theory of the evolution of human consciousness (Gebser, 1949) The potential is highlighted for children to draw adults into sensory experiences, big questions and storied relations with surroundings which can balance the potential for adults to draw children into abstract relations with a global context. Each is equally significant in forming rich, continuous connections between individuals and whole and can highlight the potential offered by Froebel's pedagogy in support of a sustainability agenda. This is through its orientation to a vision of the whole and significance of our own holistic capacities as everyday activism within this.

In this retrospective cohort study using data from an integrated primary care and subspecialty network, we examined medical records of children seen in primary care at eligible autism spectrum disorder (ASD) screening ages and followed through at least 4 years of age. We examined the prevalence of ASD; age of first documented ASD diagnosis; and whether the prevalence and age of documented diagnosis varied by race, ethnicity, socio-economic status (SES) and site of care (urban versus suburban/rural). The prevalence of ASD across the cohort was 3.2%, with a median age of diagnosis of 3.93 years. ASD prevalence was unexpectedly higher among Asian children, non-Hispanic Black children, children with higher Social Vulnerability Index scores (a neighborhood-level proxy of socio-economic risk), and children who received care in urban primary care sites. There were no statistically significant differences in age at which ASD diagnosis was documented across socio-demographic groups. Receiving primary care at an urban site accounted for most other socio-demographic differences in ASD prevalence rates, except among Asian children, who were found to have higher adjusted odds of ASD diagnosis compared to White children (aOR = 1.82, p < 0.001). Determining what clinical-, individual- or systems-level factors contribute to ASD diagnosis remains important to improve equity.

Students in Yogyakarta area require skills to meet the psychological and social challenges of high-risk natural disaster and daily life. Therefore, it requires study to explore the various students' psychosocial skills based on teachers' perspective and negative emotional states. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis were used to examine the data. The study conducted semi-structured interviews on nine physical education teachers from elementary schools in Yogyakarta. Three teachers were from the schools located in Disaster Area of volcano, two teachers were from schools in Urban Area, and four teachers were from schools located in Suburban Area. A Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS) 42 survey was also used to explore the negative emotional state of the 745 elementary school students from fourth to sixth grades in three different areas. The Physical Education (PE) teacher perceived that students' essential psychosocial skills are sufficient, but they still require skills in the following areas: stress coping, communication, social awareness, and problem solving. The children who lived in the disaster area had a lower negative emotional state than those who lived in the urban and suburban areas. The future program should involve variety of activities to decrease students' negative emotional state and develop their psychosocial skills harmoniously.

The validity of the Single-Item Self-Esteem Scale (SISE) in adolescents was not well established, and how self-esteem manifested in newly incarcerated juvenile delinquents was poorly described. Using a retrospective study with archival records, the SISE was compared to other measures of self-esteem, grit, mental health, and academic self-concept in a small juvenile detention center in the Midwest of the United States. Demographic data were analyzed, and a correlation, intraclass correlation, and kappa statistic were run to test relationships and reliability. The SISE was found to be a reliable and efficient tool to use with adolescents and juvenile delinquents. Policy recommendations applicable to juvenile delinquents and schools in general give direction using the findings.

English has been for centuries seen as the native language of speakers in the English-speaking inner circle countries, as the second language of speakers in the former British-colony outer circle countries and as an international business lingua franca among speakers in the techno-economically powerful extended circle countries. Little is known how speakers in the Expanding Circle countries where English is learned as an additional foreign language make use of the language in everyday life, for communication, and for business purposes. This article fills the gap by examining how and why English and English structures have been used in shop naming in the Expanding Circle. Surveying and observing shop names, products on sale, and neighborhood's socio-economic conditions, the study identifies possible connection between the nature of the language used, the types of products being sold and the socioeconomic nature of the neighborhood. Distributing questionnaires and interviewing shop owners, staff and buyers in the central business districts on Lombok Island, Indonesia, the study establishes linguistic ideology and socio-economic and cultural expectation behind the name selection. Three clusters of CBDs were observed: urban, suburban and tourism areas. With Chi-square analyses, the study establishes a strong relationship between the choice of language for shop names and the types of products on sale irrespective of the socio-economic conditions of the shop neighborhood. With linguistic analyses, the study shows that the choice of names in English or in English-like structures is affected by the ideology of English as the language of science, technology and modern lifestyle. English is strongly associated with modern lifestyle and the majority of lifestyle, entertainment and fashion shops are named in the English language. English-like structures are connected to English as the language of technology and shops dealing with electricity and machinery technologies are named in English-like structures. The use of these linguistic ideologies is expected to boost the image of the shops and the sale of the products and this expectation was statistically verified.

While suburban schools across the country have become increasingly racially and economically diverse in recent decades, many remain highly segregated. School attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) play a critical role in shaping these patterns of within-district segregation. AZBs are especially important in suburban areas with growing and diversifying student populations. Using novel, longitudinal AZB data dating back to 1990, authors Sarah Asson, Erica Frankenberg, Christopher Fowler, and Ruth Krebs Buck studied the relationship between AZBs and segregation over time in three large suburban districts. They found AZB changes have not yet been realized as a force for desegregation. To do so will require more explicit action prioritizing racial and economic diversity.

The suburbs are on the frontlines of a politicized culture war with critical race theory (CRT) at its center. States are passing legislation censoring teachers and administrators from using CRT in schools. This war threatens the intellectual freedom of educators and school leaders. The voices of the teachers, especially teachers of color, are largely absent. Antony Farag shares his experiences on the front lines and provides strategies for teachers and school leaders to navigate this war. He suggests that educators need to be a unifying force and that they must not be limited by censorship laws taking away their intellectual freedoms.

Media reports have shown suburban school officials being threatened and school board meetings erupting into chaos. Rachel S. White, Michael P. Evans, and Joel R. Malin examine whether these politically contentious experiences are occurring everywhere, or if there is something distinct about the contentiousness suburban superintendents face. Drawing on a national survey of superintendents, they asked: How do political experiences of rural, suburban, and urban superintendents differ? The results paint a bleak picture about the stresses of the superintendency, and the direct toll they have on some superintendents' well-being. However, they also identify ways to support suburban superintendents as they face political challenges.

Purpose: In this paper we report on the outcomes of a scenario planning project in Melbourne's (Australia) inner northern suburbs, which was undertaken in the context of an extended lockdown during Melbourne's second wave of COVID-19 infections. In this project, the researchers sought to identify the ways in which young people and youth service providers understood the challenges that the pandemic was creating for young people and the provision of youth services, and through the 5 years up to 2025. Design/methodology/approach: The project was shaped by a scenario planning methodology that produced three research informed scenarios of possible futures for young people in Melbourne's inner north in 2025. The project conducted a series of structured video interviews with young people, and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders that asked participants to reflect on the context of the pandemic, and what the future might hold in relation to young people's pathways and health and well-being, and the futures of their communities and the planet. Findings: The scenario planning methodology revealed many concerns, uncertainties and anxieties that were shared, but which also varied between young people and stakeholders--both about the immediacy of the pandemic, and its aftermaths and intersection with future crises. Originality/value: The scenario planning approach offers sociologies of education and youth a means to do the future-oriented, "hopeful" work that multiple crises for young people demand. Scenario planning is an "affirmative" exercise in hope by which sociologies can "stay with the trouble" that we find ourselves in, and that the pandemic has amplified.

The objectives of this research were to find out implementation challenges of the educational projects and policies, analyze if these policies address the issue of out of school children, and explore the parental preferences for their children's future and concerns about the educational facilities. Cultural audit approach was adopted for identification and analysis of gaps in policies and their implementation mechanism for the enhancement of school enrolment. Ethnographic research model was used to collect field data from the government officials including policy implementers, and the parents living in the suburban areas of Islamabad. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data. First eight Five-Year Plans and the last three educational policies were analyzed to find out the real issues at formulation and implementation levels. Almost 24 million children were out of school before completing primary level. The study concluded that a lot of resources were consumed while formulation of educational policies and plans. None of these Plans and Policies attained their desired goals. These policies were made without a proper knowledge of ground realities. There was always a gap between the policies makers and the implementers. Communication and coordination may be improved among the implementers so that the best results may be achieved.