This essay is a reply to James Carpenter's "Thomas Jefferson and the Ideology of Democratic Schooling." In it, I argue that there is an apophatic strain in the essay that calls into question the motivation for the undertaking.

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…

The article "There Is No Culturally Responsive Teaching Spoken Here: A Critical Race Perspective" by Cleveland Hayes and Brenda C. Juarez suggests that the current focus on meeting standards incorporates limited thoughtful discussions related to complex notions of diversity. Our response suggests a strong link between standardization and White…

There is a widespread movement today to prepare all students for college, and it is promoted in the name of democracy. I argue here that such a move actually puts our democracy at risk by forcing students into programs that do not interest them and depriving them of courses at which they might succeed. We risk losing the vision of democracy that…

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"…

Rather than delineating a list of practices that are important for ensuring that mathematics prepares students for a more democratic citizenship, the author has outlined in this article three tensions in teaching that she argues are important in developing an equity stance in mathematics education. This focus on a "stance" suggests that the kinds…

Eminent African American historian Carter G. Woodson in his book "The Miseducation of the Negro," published a generation before the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision, concerned himself not with the racial composition of classrooms and schools, but with the curricula taught both in the schools and the larger culture. Certainly Woodson…