Amid the horrors of the Second World War, a group of Board of Education officials met to plan a new public education system which would be fair to and free for all. In the seventy years since then, successive governments have not only failed to live up to their vision but have increasingly sought to interfere with the teaching and learning process…

This paper focuses on the experiences of one beginning teacher, studying the ways issues of race and ethnicity are dealt with in a predominately white elementary school. Faced with issues of racism in the classroom, the teacher had no strategies to handle either overt or covert racism, both of which appeared to be condoned by those responsible for…