This critical policy ethnography analyzes the McKinney-Vento Act and how the policy is put into practice at a school district within Central Texas. Data comes from conversations with educators occupying key roles within the McKinney-Vento operational bureaucracy at the school district and the researcher's experience as an educator and…

While the intent of the federal and state homeless education laws is clear, securing the educational rights of students without housing has been a long legal and political struggle in Chicago and Illinois. Education for students experiencing homelessness is a continuation of the civil rights struggle for equality in education and educational…

This analysis is a philosophical exploration of Marilyn Frye's metaphor of the cage and Patricia Hill Collins' theory of intersecting oppressions. It argues that social structures and forms of oppressive knowledge make up the individual wires on each person's cage and that these work to confine individuals, particularly those in the…

Affirmative action is perceived as a corrective policy intended to promote social equity (Crosby, Iyer, & Sincharoen, 2006; Curry & West, 1996; Kaplin & Lee, 2007; Oppenheimer, 1996). Indeed, affirmative action as a policy has been used to address minority underrepresentation (Ball, 2000), remedying the effects of past/current…

Kathleen deMarrais, professor in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, was honored to be invited to contribute to this special issue of "Critical Questions in Education." deMarrais addressed college/university deans to review the role of social foundations in teacher education and…

What is meant by the term "standards"? This article will use the definition of the National Academy of Sciences for their workshop on Assessing the Role of K-12 Academic Standards, "generally used to refer to both content standards, which describe material that students should be expected to learn, and performance standards, which…