Berkeley Review of Education

From Colorado and Connecticut to Florida and Texas, school shootings have struck the U.S. education system. In response, the fortification of schools has accelerated and deepened. Fortification entails prioritizing and instituting multiple types of infrastructure, technology, and routines that militarize schools while defining 'safety' as a function of the building and framing educators as responders to gun violence. Fortification asks educational administrators, teachers, and staff to work in new and different ways. It is vital to comprehend the structures, policies, conceptualizations, resources, and activities associated with fortification, as a taken for granted and costly response to gun violence in schools. We apply structure-agency theory to advance arguments on the fortification of schools. This article explicitly portrays how fortification occurs in racialized organizations. Our discussion of fortification sheds light on racist dimensions of school safety, operationalizes facets of structure-agency theory, and provides recommendations for research and practice.

For decades, gifted education equity advocates have sought to ameliorate the field’s long-standing issue of under-representation of students from historically marginalized communities. Little improvement has been realized in schools over this time (Peters, 2022). Recently, Novak (2022b) presented a GTCrit framework in a textbook primarily centered on race and directed towards gifted education practitioners and advocates; however, since critical frameworks have been largely lacking from gifted education research (Goings & Ford, 2018), and additional issues beyond race are present in the field, a broadening of Novak’s initially proposed framework may be beneficial in moving critical theories into research pertaining to gifted education. In this piece, I highlight the equity areas most relevant to the field of gifted education and build upon Novak’s (2022b) ideas to present a revised conceptual framework that could be applied to both practical settings and research about gifted education.