In this article, I use ethnographic data to theorize about the causes of Black-White racial disparities in discipline at a “mostly White” middle school. Using critical race and institutional theories, I identify two racial discipline logics: criminalized sequestering and racial exemption. These logics differently governed how school leaders and teachers administered discipline among Black and White students and created a dual system that generated disparate outcomes. Overall, my analysis aids in understanding the organizational processes that produce Black-White racial discipline disparities, introduces new theoretical concepts for future research, and brings to the fore largely unexamined punitive, in-school discipline practices.

The purpose of this study is to extend the literature on cultural reproduction theory and schools by problematizing the relationship between student background and student achievement. Using Program for International Student Assessment 2012 data, we analyze a series of random effects analyses of covariance to test the relationship between student social and cultural capital variables and student opportunity to learn (OTL) in math class for US 15-year-olds. By examining the relationship between student capital and OTL, we call attention to the role of schools in providing differential learning experiences to students, which helps to explain disparate achievement outcomes. Findings support the cultural reproduction perspective by demonstrating that students who have more access to normative education-based resources outside of school and academically aligned social networks tend to report more opportunities for problem solving and student-oriented instruction during math lessons. These results can help practitioners and policymakers identify and address patterns of stratification and inequity in schools.

This article is a case study of how educators made sense of the core ideas of a new statewide initiative intentionally designed to foster local flexibility. We trace the initiative’s core elements through (1) communication materials, (2) school principals’ understandings of the initiative and reasons for participation, and (3) teachers’ understandings of what the initiative required of them. Using interviews from principals and teachers, this article sheds light on tensions between providing flexibility and ensuring integrity to core components. Overall, our findings suggest that while principals understood the core elements of the initiative, some elements were pushed to the front and others were pushed to the back.

This study explores how college and university presidents strategically negotiate institutional pressures and competing social norms in an attempt to maintain organizational legitimacy. It examines how presidents strategically frame organizational events in ways that help constituents make sense of their actions. Using archival and qualitative methods, I examine executive sensegiving strategies in the presidential communiqués of university magazines from eight tuition-driven universities during a 15-year period (2000–2014). Data revealed presidents employed three strategies—foundational, configurational, and transformational—driven by connecting different cues (i.e., events) with frames (i.e., institutional logics). Although prior literature has described actors draw on logics as a “toolkit,” this study illuminates how they modify those “tools” over time. In the transformational strategy, university leaders engaged in boundary work, acting as “institutional entrepreneurs” to change the microfoundations—or core elements—of an institutional logic over time and especially the meanings associated with its symbols and language.

To test emerging narratives of principals’ direct effect on student outcomes on a large scale, this study investigates whether school principals’ time use for interacting with individual students is associated with academic achievement and student safety at school. Built on recent research on principals’ time use, this study explores whether economic, sociocultural, and institutional features of societies influence the amount of time principals spend interacting with individual students. This time use, in turn, is assumed to be associated with academic achievement and safety at school. To explore the linkages, the study utilizes the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) with multilevel modeling. Implications of the findings are offered for an emerging inquiry on principals’ direct effect on student outcomes and for US education policy.