In a familiar demonstration, a hoop and a solid disk of the same diameter and mass are started from rest at the top of an inclined plane and race to the bottom. The disk reaches the bottom with a larger speed than the hoop and arrives first. Why?

Writing a college-application essay has become a rite of passage for high-school seniors in the United States, one whose importance has expanded over time due to an increasingly competitive admissions process. Various commentators have noted the disturbing evolution of these essays over the years, with an ever-greater emphasis placed on obstacles…

The question of whether economic globalization promotes or depresses governments' education spending has attracted social scientists' attention for decades. Existing literature presents an interesting contrast between two theoretical scenarios, namely race to the top and race to the bottom. This paper attempts to adapt the debate to the…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed into law in 2015, explicitly prohibits the federal government from creating incentives to set national standards. The law represents a major departure from recent federal initiatives, such as Race to the Top, which beginning in 2009 encouraged the adoption of uniform content standards and expectations…

In this historical study, the author explores the racial views of Maria Montessori as expressed in her largely forgotten 1913 book, "Pedagogical Anthropology." As a physician and physical anthropologist, Montessori espoused three racial beliefs that were in wide circulation during the late nineteenth century: biological racism, racial…

The phenomenon of migration as it is known today must be understood in the larger context of the globalized economy and the "race to the bottom" that characterizes the multinational corporate relationship with the global South. A deeper understanding of the ways in which migration today is rooted in the machinations of the globalized…

This article examines prison education in England and Wales arguing that a disjuncture exists between the policy rhetoric of entitlement to education in prison at the European level and the playing out of that entitlement in English and Welsh prisons. Caught between conflicting discourses around a need to combat recidivism and a need for…

This study examines the trends of the U.S. states' reading and math proficiency standards before and after the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and explores their impact on school practices and student achievement. Drawing on the 2003-15 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) grades 4 and 8 assessment and survey…

Our work aims to substantiate and extend earlier findings on the effects of student-teacher race matching on academic achievement using longitudinal data for students in Grades 3 through 8 in Tennessee. We examine heterogenous effects not only by racial subgroup and student preparedness, as explored in prior literature, but also by levels of…

In 2009, the Obama Administration created a $4.3 billion dollar grant competition for states called "Race to the Top" (RttT). The money, earmarked from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was to be distributed by the Department of Education to states who were making efforts to adhere to precirculated reforms supported by…

The Government has a target of three million apprenticeship starts in England by 2020, and is introducing an Apprenticeship Levy on the payroll of large employers to fund this increase and to encourage greater employer engagement with apprenticeships. Concerns have been raised about whether there should be a delay to get the details right;…

The thought on many an academic's mind today is how to stop it. The "it"? The barrage of reports, papers, and interviews stating that higher education needs to embrace "disruptive change," treat students like customers, and become more entrepreneurial. In short, colleges must adopt a business model, or like blacksmith…

Scholars have spent decades trying to determine the cause and solution to an overwhelming issue called the achievement gap. The achievement gap refers to the gaps in academic achievement among certain subgroups of students. One of the most prevalent determiners between those who achieve academic success and those who do not is race. The majority…

Recent scholarship has identified how the reading assessment process can be improved by adapting to and accounting for emergent bilinguals' multilingual resources. While this work provides guidance about how teachers can take this approach within their assessment practices, this article strengthens and builds on this scholarship by combining…

Historically and contemporarily, immigration laws have disproportionately affected immigrant faculty and students of color because such laws often inadvertently function as racial policy. (Critical) legal literacy enacted via a bottom-up approach can help to address such laws. In this paper, we argue that higher education institutions are uniquely…