A historically responsive literacy framework examines teaching strategies and structures that honor the histories, identities, and literary practices of all youth from diverse cultures, and especially those who have been traditionally underserved in schools. The framework builds on other work on culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies and…

As a reviewer of middle level schools, their programs, policies, curricula, mission statements, instructional behaviors, assessment processes, and student-oriented community the author offers observations that can promote better student equity. He suggests: (1) "Producing Equity Belief Statements." Mission, Equity, or Inclusion…

This article, which was completed in January 2020, expands the author's presidential address, which was delivered at the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Annual Conference in Austin, Texas, on November 22, 2019. In her address, Heafner discusses the new ecology of social studies and focuses on concerns over the civic health of our…

In the half century since the 1966 Coleman Report, scholars have yet to develop a consensus regarding the relationship between schools and inequality. The Coleman Report suggested that schools play little role in generating achievement gaps, but social scientists have identified many ways in which schools provide better learning environments to…

Jonathan Kozol's visit to Portland, Oregon, in April 2005 included a dialogue with 55 urban middle and high school students about inequities in American schools. Students left this conversation with a stronger sense of the systemic impediments to equal education. They also felt that their voice had been heard on a topic of national import. This…

In this article, the author questions why the resegregation of U.S. schools into two systems--one poor and urban and one well-off and suburban--has remained unnoticed by the public and policy makers. As for state and national policy makers, they have diverted attention away from the deep political, social, and economic forces that have conspired…

In this article we examine Okin's ideal of a "gender-free society" and its relations to central educational values and practices. We suggest that this ideal pervades her work on the family, culture and, more recently, her focus on the developing world, and gives her liberal feminist stance its radical bite. We contrast this ideal with the more…

Betsy Rogers is the National Teacher of the Year. She teaches elementary school in Leeds, Alabama, near Birmingham, where she developed a looping class, staying with the same students for two years, from first through second grades. A teacher for 22 years, Rogers earned her bachelor's degree in elementary education in 1974 at Samford University.…

This article discusses the Atayal aboriginal kindergarten program in Taiwan, known as the Kui-whai kindergarten program. While teaching a course on "Designing Kindergarten Curriculum" at a teacher-training program in Taiwan, the author realized that she had seven aboriginal preservice teachers in her class; previously she had none. Those…

Review of four articles on nonmetropolitan trends suggests that (1) access to adequate education and other services should be ensured regardless of locale; (2) urban-rural dichotomies are politically useless; and (3) rural schools and communities should pursue locally defined goals. A coherent comprehensive rural policy is needed that values…