In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • From the Editorial Board
  • Meredith N. Sinclair, Managing Editor

This issue marks an historic turning point for The High School Journal. For 90 years, HSJ has operated as a project of the School of Education at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Last summer, faculty in the school voted to hand leadership and management of the journal over to students in the Culture, Curriculum, and Change Ph.D. program. Nine of us answered the call to guide the journal into a new era and have been working over the past six months to reconceptualize and restructure HSJ as it nears its 100-year anniversary.

When our new editorial staff and editorial board met for the first time in September, we debated what exactly we hoped the journal would be and represent. It seemed clear that in order to stay true to HSJ's original mission to report on the state of secondary education, we would need to define what issues were of greatest concern to those involved in the field. All of us are former classroom teachers currently engaged in a program of study that emphasizes the role of education in changing and shaping our culture and society. As a result, we easily developed a litany of topics we felt are in need of further exploration and debate in the area of secondary education.

Throughout the fall, our biggest struggle surprisingly was the creation of the mission statement, our articulation of what the focus of the journal would be. We found that we had more questions than answers about what matters in secondary education and therefore to the readers of our journal. One theme consistently emerged during our discussions – high schools have become increasingly isolated and decontextualized from the world around them. We realized that our primary goal as a journal should be creating a space to problemitize this decontextualization, to challenge the way in which society attempts to understand and reform secondary education without adequately addressing its interactions with and place in the world. In other words, the fact that we had more questions than answers now drives our mission; the idea is not to rehash what we know, but explore what we don't know. [End Page 1]

There is no one type of article we feel will best address this goal. Our hope is that the pages of HSJ will be a home to a variety of research-based articles; we welcome both qualitative and quantitative inquires as well as those that explore pertinent issues through theory. We also envision a space for narrative reflections on the art of secondary teaching and the issues that surround schools—you will find two such articles in this volume.

To better serve our readers and potential authors, we have begun developing a more rigorous review process that we hope will provide more useful and substantive feedback for those who submit manuscripts and better serve our readership. Our editorial board will engage in regular discussions about the manuscripts we are reviewing; our hope is that this will further dialogue and push forward debate on various issues relevant to secondary education. A new regular feature of HSJ will be this column, allowing for written commentary on an issue that arises from our discussions as a board.

We are excited to be ushering in these changes at a time when our nation is poised and ready for change in many facets of society. We hope that the topics and arguments raised in these pages will both challenge and enhance the ongoing debate about reform as we work to better understand the many challenges of secondary education. [End Page 2]

Meredith N. Sinclair, Managing Editor
highschooljournal@unc.edu
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