Murray Levine (1928-2020).

Memorializes Murray Levine (1928-2020), a pioneer in community psychology. In 1968 Levine became professor of psychology and director of the clinical and community psychology program at State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo), soon making it one of the top programs in the country. At Buffalo, he shaped community psychology through nu merous books and articles and by mentoring many doctoral-level students and junior faculty. His research at the intersection of law and psychology focused on mandated reporting, eye-witness testimony, the child welfare sys tem, and education reform. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Promoting institutional change to support public psychology: Innovations and challenges at the University of California.

Community partnerships are vital for the co-production, implementation, and dissemination of practice- and policy-relevant research to advance public psychology. Particularly in "Research 1" universities, the institutional infrastructure, culture, and criteria for faculty advancement are often a mismatch for impactful community-partnered research. Past and current efforts by psychologists and others at the University of California (UC) seek to promote partnerships, infrastructure, and practices for faculty development and advancement that align excellence and impact in scholarship with advancing the public mission of the UC and its campuses. Here, we delineate "partnered" public scholarship and provide an overview of mismatch between this scholarship and university structures. We then describe unique features of the UC and three cases of interdisciplinary partnerships to advance educational equity that illustrate how distinctive campuses and units engaged resources, deployed diverse strategies, and succeeded as well as failed to address challenges related to (a) how partnered scholarship is enacted, (b) supports to sustain the initiatives, and (c) faculty evaluation. We then consider lessons learned, implications, and ethical issues related to public psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Teacher expectations, classroom context, and the achievement gap.

In two independent datasets with 1872 elementary-aged children in 83 classrooms, Studies 1 and 2 examined the role of classroom context in moderating the relationship between child ethnicity and teacher expectations. For Study 1 overall and Study 2 mixed-grade classrooms, in ethnically diverse classrooms where students reported high levels of differential teacher treatment (PDT) towards high and low achieving students, teacher expectations of European American and Asian American students were between .75 and 1.00 standard deviations higher than teacher expectations of African American and Latino students with similar records of achievement. In highly diverse low-PDT classrooms in Study 1 and highly diverse low-PDT mixed-grade classrooms in Study 2, teachers held similar expectations for all students with similar records of achievement. Study 3 estimated the contribution of teacher expectations to the year-end ethnic achievement gap in high- and low-bias classrooms. In high-bias classrooms, teacher expectancy effects accounted for an average of .29 and up to .38 standard deviations of the year-end ethnic achievement gap.

The discipline gap and African Americans: defiance or cooperation in the high school classroom.

African Americans are over-represented in school suspensions, yet little is known about the underlying contributing dynamics. Study 1 reviewed a high school's annual discipline data and 442 students referred for defiance. African Americans were over-represented in referrals for defiance and most students received referrals from one or several teachers. This suggests that defiance referrals are specific to the classroom situation. Examining the situational specificity of referrals, Study 2 used repeated measures and multilevel modeling with a sub-sample of 30 African American students. Attendance, grades, and teacher reports showed that students behaved more defiantly and less cooperatively with teachers perceived as having untrustworthy authority. Predictors of African American student trust in teacher authority included teacher caring and high expectations, offering implications for lowering the discipline gap.

Reaching higher in community psychology: social problems, social settings, and social change.

Forty years after the founding of community psychology, we have yet to deliver on the full promissory note of our birth, where we were poised to address social problems, social settings, and social change. Despite some success, we are at risk for selling ourselves short, for dying out in the discipline of psychology, and for failing to improve the common good. Given changes in demographics and in the safety net, the problem of entrenched disparities is even more urgent-in perception of the other, in the provision of opportunities for development, and in outcomes. Envisioning and enabling will be critical as we work with unified purpose toward a cumulative science where failure will not be predictable.

Intractable self-fulfilling prophecies fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education.

The civil rights struggle for equal educational opportunity has yet to be achieved at the start of the 21st century. Inequality persists but problem and remedy are refrained from integrating schools, to ensuring equal access in resegregated settings, to closing the performance gap. As seen through ecological theory (R. S. Weinstein, 2002b), complex, multilayered, and interactive negative self-fulfilling prophecies create or perpetuate educational inequities and unequal outcomes. Society has failed to grapple with its entrenched roots in the achievement culture of schools. If this insidious dynamic is to be changed, an educational system that sorts for differentiated pathways must be replaced with one that develops the talents of all. Psychology has a critical role to play in promoting a new understanding of malleable human capabilities and optimal conditions for their nurturance in schooling.

Urban adolescents' exposure to community violence: the role of support, school safety, and social constraints in a school-based sample of boys and girls.

This study examined recent exposure to violence in the community and in other settings, protective factors, and current psychological functioning among 349 young adolescents from 9 urban middle schools. The majority (76%) of adolescents reported witnessing or being victimized by at least 1 violent event in the prior 6 months. Nearly half of adolescents who had talked about their experience of a violent event reported feeling constrained from sharing their thoughts or feelings because of others' reactions. After controlling for daily hassles, more exposure to violence was associated with more self-reported posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depressive symptoms. Exposure to violence was not a significant predictor of teachers' ratings of adaptive functioning or internalizing symptoms. Support from specific individuals, perceived school safety, and lower constraints for discussing violence showed protective effects in the relation between exposure to violence and specific dimensions of psychological functioning. The implications of this research for school-based interventions are discussed.

The development and consequences of stereotype consciousness in middle childhood.

Two studies including an ethnically diverse sample of 202 children ages 6 to 10 examined the development and consequences of children's awareness of others' stereotypes ("stereotype consciousness"). Study 1 revealed that between ages 6 and 10, children's ability to infer an individual's stereotype increases dramatically. Children's awareness of broadly held stereotypes also increases with age, and children from academically stigmatized ethnic groups (African Americans and Latinos) are at all ages more likely be aware of broadly held stereotypes than children from academically nonstigmatized ethnic groups (Whites and Asians). Study 2 revealed that among children from stigmatized ethnic groups aware of broadly held stereotypes, on 1 of 2 challenging cognitive tasks and self-reported effort, diagnostic testing conditions led to stereotype threat effects.

Overcoming inequality in schooling: a call to action for community psychology.

Community psychology, indeed psychology as a discipline, has been largely absent from the table of school reform. Schools are critical socializing forces in society and serve as the one institution through which the full diversity of our child population passes. At the start of the 21st century, despite successive waves of legislation, the goals of the civil rights struggle for equality in educational opportunity have yet to be achieved. Negative self-fulfilling prophecies, reflected at individual, interpersonal, institutional, and societal levels, play a critical role in creating and perpetuating unequal opportunities to learn. Such effects as well as pathways for preventive intervention are best understood through ecological lenses. Our field must commit a greater share of resources to collaborative and systemic change for a broader learning so that all children, regardless of their differences, have continuing and nonstigmatized opportunities to develop into competent adults.