Despite the potential for media and technology to act as a democratizing force and the challenges to democracy posed by partisanship and the explosion of political media spending, media education and the preparation of active citizens in schools is virtually nonexistent. This essay presents the case for revitalizing media education for the age of…

This article critically analyzes the application of charter school techniques in teacher education, especially in two noteworthy programs: the newly developed Relay Graduate School of Education and Match Teacher Residency. We describe how their approaches to teacher preparation differ from traditional teacher education programs. We also raise…

According to the United Nations, education is a right to which all human beings are entitled. Since 2000, the UN has been promoting the Millennium Development Goal to achieve free universal primary education for all, regardless of gender, by 2015. If the UN is correct to suggest that education is both a human right in itself and an indispensable…

This article explores civic learning, civic participation, and the development of civic agency within the Council of Youth Research (the Council), a program that engages high school students in youth participatory action research projects that challenge school inequalities and mobilize others in pursuit of educational justice. We critique the…

In this article, we are concerned with White racial domination as a process that occurs in teacher education and the ways it operates to hinder the preparation of teachers to effectively teach all students. Our purpose is to identify and highlight moments within processes of White racial domination when individuals and groups have and make choices…

Eli Broad's approach to reforming urban public education does not recognize his own self-interest in promoting changes within such educational systems, a classic problem of misrecognition. The Broad agenda is an assault on the notion of the mission of public education as a service instead of a for-profit enterprise concerned with making money for…

The current era of standards and accountability in U.S. public schooling narrows recognition and assessment to an almost exclusive focus on the production of test scores as legitimate markers of student achievement. This climate prevents rather than encourages democratic forms of exchange within and across social worlds. Via a case study of one…

Mueller, Tippins, and Bryan (2012) presented a new conceptualization of citizen science that is meant to facilitate emerging trends in the democratization of science and science education to produce civically engaged students. I review some relevant trends in the field of citizen science, for clarity here referred to as public participation in…

We critique the "college for all" discourse by unveiling its relationship to the politics of education, the broader economic and political contexts, and the class and race structures embedded in society and schooling, including higher education. We analyze the current and future labor markets to demonstrate the ways that the "college for all"…

In this essay, I respond to Carrie Nolan and Sarah M. Stitzlein's article "Meaningful Hope for Teachers in a Time of High Anxiety and Low Morale" and support their argument for meaningful hope grounded in pragmatist philosophy. I agree that while hope is routinely called for in the educational literature, it is often done so in superficial and…

This response to ""Buscando la Libertad": Latino Youths in Search of Freedom in School" by Jason G. Irizarry demonstrates how youth participatory action research (YPAR) as an instrument of subverting oppressive school policies and structures is a form of critical policy analysis (CPA). As an evolving method, CPA acknowledges the absent voices in…

President Barack Obama's Race to the Top (RTT) is a profoundly flawed educational reform plan that increases standardization, centralization, and test-based accountability in our nation's schools. Following a brief summary of the interest groups supporting the plan, who is currently participating in this race, why so many states voluntarily…

Math education in the United States remains resistant to systemic change, and our country pays the price. Stemhagen's article "Democracy and School Math" further confirms this trend. Despite repeated calls for reform, decades of research on how people learn, millions of dollars invested in teacher professional development, and years of politicized…

Although the federal government claims otherwise, Race to the Top is not research based. Rather, its foundation is in ideology and belief-based realism. The overall effort is fundamentally antiscientific and distracts valuable and needed attention, resources, and focus from the nation's real problems of social, economic, and educational…

While some students have the opportunity to engage in the kinds of structured inquiry and real-world problem solving called for in the science education reform literature, many other students receive only a daily grind of note taking, end-of-chapter questions and sample test items from state assessments. The result is an engagement gap whereby…