This article addresses the ongoing conflicts over the effectiveness of school choice in America's educational system. After discussing the ideological foundations of the school choice movement, I analyze four controversies where the research done to evaluate school choice programs was hotly debated and inconclusive. The central holding of the…

Is the popularity of market-based educational reform among urban residents of color the epitaph of a progressive educational vision, or does it bespeak a struggle to reincarnate that vision within a postwelfare state? This article examines ethnographic work with African American voucher families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Discursive overlaps and…

A persistent belief in American culture is that males both outperform and have a higher inherent aptitude for mathematics than females. Using data from two school districts in two different states in the United States, this study used longitudinal multilevel modeling to examine whether overall performance on standardized as well as classroom tests…

The aim of this article is to describe and analyze the undergraduate Social Foundations course I taught at an urban, inclusive university that attempted to provide students with, among other things, a forum for them to develop both a self-confident personal voice and a view of self as potential change agent of schools. In brief, with what I term…

A decade after Kinsey published his famous studies on sexuality, a special legislative committee in Florida targeted gay and lesbian teachers in an investigation that led to the dismissal and loss of credentials for scores of educators. The Florida purge of 1959-1964 remains without parallel in educational history in terms of its intensity and…

This article focuses on the effectiveness of antihomophobia discourses and explores the process of teaching and learning about heteronormativity. The author offers an interrogation of the regulatory fictions within heteronormativity and frameworks of resistance and examines attempts to move beyond established views of sexual minority students and…

The choice of a teacher to be "out" in the classroom is perhaps unadvisable, possibly joyous, potentially disastrous, positively political, and just plain hard. For me, the choice to be out in the classroom has met with some consequences that do not match my expectations. This essay is an autoethnographic writing performance of my identity as a…

This article explores the ways in which high school girl popularity is constructed as heterosexual and normatively gendered, leaving lesbian adolescents on the periphery of the high school social scene. Based upon data from a larger critical life history study with adolescent lesbians, this article explores their experiences of school, friendship,…

This article examines how Black teachers in overwhelmingly White schools evaluate their work experiences as both numerical and racial minorities. I extend Kanter's (1977) theory of tokenism through a look at how ideology shapes the work experiences and evaluations of racial tokens. Kanter developed a framework that outlined 3 general processes…

This article is an attempt to critique some of the limitations of dominant school reform discourses in education, drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Michael Apple, Maxine Greene, and Dennis Carlson, in addition to writers in the emerging field of what might be called "eco-progressivism." The intersections between ecology and education can…

The notion of desire in theorizing pedagogical relations has a long tradition within foundations of education. Contemporary scholarship on desire in educational theory is informed by sexuality studies and queer theory. This article both builds and expands contemporary dialogue on desire as informed by some of the debates within sexuality studies,…

This article puts forth 2 competing notions of the American Dream, 1 radical and 1 conservative (both put forth by Thomas Jefferson), as the basis for 2 competing public philosophies of American democracy and education. This article traces out the ecology of inequality that has determined the context of these 2 competing public philosophies,…

Women have played an undeniable part in shaping the history of philosophy and philosophy of education for at least 1,000 years. Yet, current anthologies, encyclopedias, and textbooks in the field rarely recognize large numbers of women's works as consequential to our understanding of the development of educational topics and debates. This article,…

In this article, my goals are to speak theoretically and methodologically about researching with, for, and about queer youth in ways that trouble identities as people represent them. I do so within examinations of (hetero)normativity and exploring the promise of queering qualitative methodologies. Opening with a brief contextualization of the…

This article aims to enlarge the conversation about religion and public education by inviting readers to think about the benefits to be gained in society by providing a comprehensive religious studies curriculum in our public schools. In such a program, students will develop knowledge and understanding about various religious traditions, forge…