In this chapter, the author reviews the legal trajectory of language rights in public schooling in the United States and how language has been intertwined with other policy issues in court cases aimed at expanding access and equity for minority students: desegregation and school finance. Most of these cases originated in the Southwestern United…

The content of the present issue of "Review of Research in Education" (RRE) is timely and important, allowing considered, multiperspectival active reflection, what the author calls cerebration, on language diversity as well as a call for concerted action for linking better the findings of research to the imperatives of teaching. In…

"Review of Research in Education: Vol. 38, Language Policy, Politics, and Diversity in Education" explores the role of educational language policies in promoting education as a human right. There are an estimated nearly 7,000 living languages in the world. Yet, despite the extent of language diversity, only a small number of the…

This article examines the role of language policies in mediating access and equity in education. By examining a range of research and case studies on language policies, the authors explore how educational language policies serve as a central gatekeeper to education itself, as well as to quality education that may fundamentally depend on language…

This chapter offers a situated account of English and vernacular literacy practices from a postcolonial perspective. Situated in ongoing endeavors in a variety of local contexts in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, where the author was raised and schooled, this chapter calls attention to some key educational sites through which these policy-related…

In this article, the authors examine the literature on parental involvement highlighting the equity issues that it raises in educational practice. They begin with a brief historical overview of approaches to parent involvement and the ways in which "neodeficit" discourses on parents permeate current education reform efforts. Next, they address how…

This chapter proposes that the relationship between schooling, citizenship, and democracy--so often taken for granted and discussed using idealistic perspectives--is better understood when using the lens of "embodied cognition" and a focus on metaphorical and prototypical ways of thinking. Our goal is to examine the always conflictive and elusive…

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 article, the authors draw on findings from several recent studies, particularly the work on the new media-rich programming environment, Scratch, to demonstrate that contemporary youth communities move fluidly across blurry boundaries to engage in both new media literacies and computer literacies in their do-it-yourself (DIY) activities.…

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…

Writing on contemporary culture and social life, sociologists and cultural theorists have been describing new or changing forms of movement, variously described as cultural "flows," "liquid life," or a "networked society." The change in such movements or mobilities of people, media, material goods, and other social phenomena, including the reach…

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…