In this article, the authors explore the potential of youth organizing to promote civic development, new forms of civic engagement that make public institutions more accountable and responsive to the needs of their constituencies, and an expanded commitment to acting in the interest of the public good. Their analysis draws from both the literature…

In the past 150 years, educational systems have expanded and become integrally linked with economic, political, and social status in modern nation-states. As the stakes for education have risen, so has the call for more and improved use of scientific evidence as a basis for educational policymaking. Evidence from averaged scores on international…

Education names and classifies individuals. This result seems unavoidable. For example, some students will graduate, and some will not. Those who graduate will be "graduates"; those who do not graduate will be labeled otherwise. The only way to avoid such labeling is to fail to make distinctions of any kind. Yet education is rife with…

The call for American students to meet world-class standards in the federal Goals 2000: Education America Act (1994) and No Child Left Behind legislation, as well as state standards and accountability legislation, has been explicitly inclusive: All students must be held to these high standards. Litigation offers the potential to leverage…

Defining equity within the context of a diverse, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural society, and one where social class strongly influences one's life chances is problematic. This chapter reexamines equity in an attempt to advance the discourse beyond the debate about strategies to close the achievement gap between White…

The idea that validity should be considered a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, has developed slowly over the past century. In early writings about the validity of educational assessments, validity was defined as a property of an assessment. The most common definition was that an assessment was valid to the extent that it…

This article reviews educational literatures that should be relevant to helping individuals understand and improve the lot and life chances of girls and boys who are at risk in a global world. The authors began this review with a vignette from India, a country whose linguistic and ethnic diversity, whose international reputation for advances in…

Passed by the U.S. Congress in the spring of 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was one of the most significant and expansive education policy initiatives ever undertaken by the federal government. The main component of the act, Title I, allocated significant resources to…

This chapter traces the legal, legislative, and political history of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Focusing attention on the various related educational reform movements, it discusses the federal role in education policy in the context of its influence on ESEA and the legislation's related amendments. Also, the authors examine…

This chapter discusses the federal government's role in strengthening accountability for student performance under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). NCLB represents a major legislative expansion of the role of the federal government in elementary and secondary education, and it has had significant implications for federal-state…

The consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) are most often thought of in terms of achievement and attainment in elementary and secondary education. In this chapter, however, the authors assess what NCLB might mean for college access by examining existing evidence of the effects of school-based accountability on college participation.…