Educational policy and practice has resided and continues to reside at the vortex of social and political strife in South Africa, as in the United States. Although school poverty and inequities among schools in the U.S. pale in comparison to conditions in South Africa, the two nations have much in common, including histories of state-sanctioned…

Today the Kamehameha Schools are widely known for excellent education. In part this is due to the almost $9 billion dollar value of the Bishop Estate that funds and controls the schools. Unfortunately, its success has led to non-Hawaiians challenging its admissions policy, which has since its inception been based upon admitting Native Hawaiian…

The purpose of this article is to discuss the misalignment between public school assessment policies and teaching practices in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), and the human capital, curricula, and soft-skill needs of the global economy. The authors suggest that changes regarding the nature of learning, how it is…

This article explores the sociopolitical context of education policy, particularly as it relates to Latina/o education. The authors highlight the status of Latinas/os within the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to examine the impact of education policy designed to benefit few and disenfranchise most. They draw attention to the injustices of Latinas/os…

In 1982 civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson criticized President Ronald Reagan's attacks on busing to coerce school desegregation for targeting "not the bus, but us." Two decades later, the United States Supreme Court ended the thirty-two-year-old Charlotte, North Carolina, plan which had launched the era of court-ordered busing…

Parental and community involvement play a key role in the Chinese American students' fight for their rights. In order to understand the reasons behind the parental and community support of Chinese students, a survey was conducted among Chinese parents to assess what they know about language loss, power, knowledge, and democracy. The results…

The current school reform era has moved through a series of phases, coupling state centralization with a focus on school-level change at each step. Yet this era of reform also has a deeper history. Its deeper history reveals the dynamics that would plague the school reform era until the present day. While the school reform era seemed to focus on…

Over the past decade, numerous shifts in education policy have been proposed and implemented in the attempt to improve educational opportunities for the diverse American population. Some of these changes have been initiated by the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2001) via its mix of standards, accountability, and punitive…

In this article, the author attempts to enter the charter school dialogue by looking at the new charter school movement through an anti-essentialist social movement and new social movement lens. In the anti-Western new social movement conception there are no set patterns to how movements manifest themselves, or how they were intended to manifest…

When addressing the problems for today's educators, Jonathon Kozol has joined with teachers' unions like the National Education Association to "stave off an onslaught of misguided federal dictates" in order to "help mobilize teachers to take action politically and launch a new movement for racial integration" (Jehlen, p. 17). Unfortunately for…

Policy "alternatives" begin as general ideas, and are inherently distinct from an innovation or reform that has been adopted by policy makers in a specific context in order to serve particular purposes. However, the interplay between the idea itself and that moment in time when it is adopted has often not been fully understood. In this article,…

In this article, the author evaluates the policy choices sanctioned by state systems of performance-based accountability. She notes how first-generation models of educational accountability were mainly bureaucratic and regulatory in nature and how the accountability movement of the 1970s and 1980s evidenced a shift from an emphasis on rules to a…

In this article, the author offers an analysis of key problems with the latest Federal school reform initiative. He critiques the No Child Left Behind Act's (NCLB) Title One as it relates to standardized testing and accountability. In addition, he provides a short history of the Act, connecting it to President Lyndon Johnson's historic Elementary…

Discusses how federal policies in educational practice widen the equity gap between privileged and underprivileged students and schools. Using a case study of a North Carolina elementary school, the paper argues that high stakes testing policies of excellence actually worsen conditions of teaching and learning and push imperative principles of…

Explores both the development of child welfare in the United States and the impact of international declarations of human and child rights from a global perspective, focusing on: child welfare and the visiting teacher profession in the United States; research on the well-being of children; child welfare policy in an international context; the…