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Historically Black colleges and universities play a vital role in the education of African Americans in the United States. For nearly 150 years, these institutions have trained the leadership of the Black community, graduating the nation s African American teachers, doctors, lawyers, and scientists. Despite the wealth of new research on Black colleges, there are topics that remain untouched and accomplishments that go unnoticed by the scholarly community. The chapters in this edited volume focus on topics that deserve further attention and that will push students, scholars, policymakers, and Black college administrators to reexamine their perspectives on and perceptions of Black colleges.

This book employs a socio-cultural approach to study the organizational dynamics and experiences of self-formation that shape community college life. The authors use case studies to analyze both the symbolic dimension and practices that enable the production of educational experiences in seven community colleges across the U.S. Levin and Montero-Hernandez explain the construction of organizational identity and student development as a result of the connection between institutional forces and individual agency. This work emphasizes the forms and conditions of interaction among college personnel, students, and external groups that were enacted to respond to the demands and opportunities in both participants local and larger contexts. The authors acknowledge both the collective and individual efforts of community college personnel to create caring community colleges that support nontraditional students.

This book begins with the claims of policymakers and explores charter schools at each stage of the policymaking process, from legislation to implementation. Powers carefully and thoroughly examines how features of schools' policy contexts shape the ways that charter school reform unfolds at schools, providing a nuanced portrait of the schools participating in this much discussed and little understood reform movement. While policymakers are often prone to making sweeping claims about the efficacy of charter schools, in practice charter school reform is much more complex. By drawing on an extensive and compelling range of data, Powers assesses the validity of policymakers claims.

This book discusses the strategies that the Singapore Education System has embarked to encourage school change and innovations. It documents the change journey of Specialized Schools and Future Schools in Singapore with a view to understand the key tenets that enable school wide change and reform. The intents for change and reform are to anchor the education system to the basic foundations and principles of education and yet enable the system as a whole to be malleable to change and globalization. It shows how Singapore enables diversity within a structured environment through innovations in Specialized and Future Schools, and highlights the systemic rationale behind various efforts in Specialized and Future Schools and the kinds of adaptations schools have made to leverage structures and make adjustments for their contexts.