School Context and Charter School Achievement: A Framework for Understanding the Performance "Black Box"
Peabody Journal of Education: Issues of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations - Vol. 84, No. 2
Janelle Scott, University of California at Berkley
Adriana Villavicencio, New York University
ABSTRACT
This article explores the relationship between charter school racial composition, school environments, and student achievement. We offer an original framework for understanding school context and its influence on schooling outcomes. We conclude that policymakers could better attend to the persistent educational inequality that has shaped U.S. schooling if when designing school choice plans they took account of student racial composition even in a postdesegregation environment.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Janelle Scott is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and a 2008-09 National Academy of Education-Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Editor of School choice and diversity: What the evidence says (2005 Teachers College Press), she studies racial politics of public education, the politics of school choice, and the role of private sector actors and elites in shaping urban public education policies.
Adriana Villavicencio is a Founders Fellow and a doctoral candidate in the Educational Leadership Program at New York University. Adriana has served as a department chair at a charter high school in East Oakland and as an English teacher in East New York and Bushwick. She also spent a year in Bangalore, India developing a secondary program for a start-up K-12 school. Ms. Villavicencio earned a B.A. in English from Columbia University and a M.A. in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently an Editor for the Journal of Equity in Education.
