The "information era" has brought up new literacies, although most of them are still not part of the K-12 curriculum or the teacher education curriculum. One of these new literacies is critical media literacy. The purpose of this article is to document the urgency for including this new literacy in school and teacher education curricula given the…

Poor people have been described in a range of ways. This article begins by tracing the term "underclass" in its social and political context from the 1960s to present, examining its transference from academia to lay usage through analysis of widely accessible periodicals of the time. Next, it engages the work of Earl Shorris, a writer who devised…

In this article, we examine the invocation of Socrates as the exemplar for Earl Shorris' Clemente Course in the Humanities program. Our aim is to temper Shorris' claim that the Socratic method and the humanities are tools for political liberation. Though they may have this consequence, they are not exhausted by this consequence. Rather, this…

In 1995, author Earl Shorris established a small educational program designed to help young adults escape from poverty. The curriculum chosen by Shorris for this experimental program focused solely on a classically based, college-level study in the humanities. While I do not find that Shorris provided proof that a classically inspired course in…

In the Fall 2003 issue of Educational Studies, Ian Harris provided a historical assessment of the progress of peace education in the United States, in which he concluded with the sobering observation that, "peace education remains peripheral to mainstream educational endeavors" (349). Harris attributed the failures of peace education to the…

In this article, the author relates two cases that foreshadow the cultural politics of colonial structures. Drawing upon poststructural, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theoretical approaches, the author analyzes a range of textual productions manifested in dispersed sites that have formed the colonial image-repertoire and subjectification of…

Although New York's highest court granted children the constitutional right to a meaningful high school education in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York, equitable funding has yet to be implemented. The state of New York continues to stall on revising the funding formula statewide, despite the many indications that this must be done if…

Through his detailed descriptions of schools across America, Kozol (1991) demonstrated the symbolic impact of the physical space of schools with disturbing examples of institutionalized racism made visible. Thus, Savage Inequalities also initiated a critical pedagogy of place by questioning the relationship of racial identity to the quality and…

Since Jonathan Kozol's 1991 publication of "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools," East St. Louis, Illinois, District 189 has endured unswerving criticism and study. While Kozol's work made publicly known the horrible conditions of schools in the district, it did not bring immediate relief. In 1994, the state appointed a financial…

In 2004, the Department for Education and Skills in England published its Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (DfES, 2004). It was preceded by Excellence and Enjoyment: a strategy for primary schools (DfES, 003). "Excellence and enjoyment" seems to constitute an ambiguity, even a contradiction. The government's view is otherwise. It…

This paper focuses on school choice and the extent to which admissions to publicly-funded secondary schools in England address issues of equity and social justice. It argues that schools with responsibility for their own admissions are more likely than others to act in their own self interest by "selecting in" or "creaming" particular pupils and…

Over the last few years there has been a renewed interest in questions of citizenship and in particular its relation to young people. This has been allied to an educational discourse where the emphasis has been upon questions concerned with "outcome" rather than with "process"--with the curriculum and methods of teaching rather than questions of…

This article describes a theory about the ambition of most Inspectorates to realise 'school improvement through inspection'. Literature about a number of direct and indirect interventions, such as reciprocity, communication and feedback is used to build a theoretical model stating the relations between working methods of school inspectors,…

In 1999 Stephen Gorard published an article in this journal in which he provided a trenchant critique of what he termed the "politician's error" in analysing differences in educational attainment. The main consequence of this error, he argued, has been the production of misleading findings in relation to trends in educational performance over time…

The term "publication bias" usually refers to the tendency for a greater proportion of statistically significant positive results of experiments to be published and, conversely, a greater proportion of statistically significant negative or null results not to be published. It is widely accepted in the fields of healthcare and psychological…