This chapter examines the following central question: How do direct democratic ballot initiatives affect the public good? A second, related question is this: When voters collectively make policy decisions, what responsibilities do researchers have to contribute to informing public deliberation about the relevant issues? In an attempt to answer…

Access to education is one of a range of social citizenship rights that are intended to afford members of a society an opportunity to share in a basic level of social, economic, and cultural well-being and to mitigate societal inequalities. The idea that every individual has a right to education is deeply entrenched in the international discourse…

The strong relationship between education and civic engagement is what leads Fraga and Frost (2010) to describe the U.S. school system as a "center of democratic governance" (p. 119). For immigrant communities, schools also serve to foster political socialization and incorporation. This chapter considers schools' democratic roles from an input…

In this chapter, the authors examine developments in the teacher workforce and in the occupation of teaching across recent generations. They take their point of departure from the perspective of prevailing policy discourse on enduring problems of educational equity, asking not only how teaching has evolved in recent decades but more specifically…

Studies of race, class, and educational risk often proceed in an established but misleading order: First, race is defined as a trait given at birth and turned into trouble by prejudice and unequal conditions; then, class is defined as traits socialized into children with diminished socioeconomic opportunities; finally, risk is treated as the…

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…

This article engages in the debate about what counts as professional knowledge from the perspective of improving outcomes for diverse learners. The authors begin by highlighting the importance of assumptions about appropriate roles for teachers and how those assumptions have shaped the debate about what teachers need to know. Then, they consider…

This article focuses on the basic idea that having equality and justice for all in schooling cannot be achieved in the current climate where students are viewed solely as individuals. In fact, given the educational debt and achievement gaps, the ideas of equality and justice are necessarily contradictory. Achieving justice, in light of the…

The goals of this chapter are threefold. The first goal is to examine the scientific attainment of African Americans in the post-"Brown" era. The term scientific attainment is used here to describe more broadly mathematics and scientific achievement as measured in trend studies, academic coursework, and degrees. A second, related goal is to…