Schools have a seminal role in preparing a society's children for their adult responsibilities as workers, parents, friends, neighbors, and citizens. The United States, countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Brazil, India, South Africa, and other multiethnic democratic nation-states have increasingly diverse…

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…

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…

This chapter attempts to survey contemporary debates and research on outcomes of schooling that have been grouped together under the convenient label "nonacademic". This is not an affirmative labeling. As the nomenclature indicates, it is not a label that groups together things that share like properties. Rather, this is a label of distinction, a…

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…

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…

Who is at risk in school, and what does race have to do with it? Studies of the extent to which race correlates with educational outcomes and elucidates achievement gaps predate the discourse on risk. In this chapter, the authors analyze the survey literature that statistically defines some racial groups and not others as being at educational…

In this chapter, the author offers a historical overview of constructions of risk in the context of schooling for nondominant groups and how communities have organized schooling in ways that support resiliency in the face of these risks. She discusses an expansive orientation to understanding how people learn to respond to risks that is rooted 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…

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.…

Studies suggest that developmental students like peer tutoring, are more relaxed with peers, and feel that peer tutoring helps their grades. However, the small number of studies on college tutoring provides no consistent evidence that underprepared students who are tutored improve either their grades or grade point averages. The students who do…