In this chapter, the authors offer a critical examination of a growing field of educational inquiry and social practice: the reclamation of Indigenous mother tongues. They use the term "reclamation" purposefully to denote that these are languages that have been forcibly subordinated in contexts of colonization. Language reclamation…

Sooner or later, as schools move to implement the new Common Core and other forthcoming standards, almost every teacher in the United States will face the challenge of how to support students from homes where English is not the dominant language in meeting subject-matter academic expectations that require increasingly demanding uses of language…

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…

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…

When first conceived, charter schools were envisioned as local projects initiated by parents and/or groups of teachers seeking to improve the educational performance of students. In the past two decades, the phenomenon has expanded to more than 5% of all U.S. public schools and almost 3% of all students (Center for Education Reform [CER], 2009).…

In this chapter, "geospatial" refers to geographic space that includes location, distance, and the relative position of things on the earth's surface. Geospatial perspective calls for the addition of a geographic lens that focuses on place and space as important contextual variables. A geospatial view increases one's understanding of…

Du Bois's (1903) idea of the color line has not disappeared from American culture and politics. Perhaps it has grown fainter with the momentous changes of the past half century, culminating in the election of the first Black U.S. President in 2008. But the 21st century promises to feature a different line, one that partially grows out of the color…

In this article, the authors provide a selective review of both research and policy represented in part by two concepts that have been discussed in educational research--the "right to learn" and the notion of "literacy as a civil right" and how these issues of access and equity are undermined by the school-to-prison pipeline.…

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…

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…

The idea that validity should be considered a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, has developed slowly over the past century. In early writings about the validity of educational assessments, validity was defined as a property of an assessment. The most common definition was that an assessment was valid to the extent that it…

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…

The numbers of im/migrant children in schools have increased throughout the world. The principal receiving areas are North America, Western Europe, the Persian Gulf, Asia and the Pacific, and the Southern Cone of South America. In the United States, one out of every four children younger than the age of 8 lives in a family where at least one…

Two major reform efforts in K-12 science education have taken place during the past 50 years. The first was the 1950-1970 curriculum reform efforts motivated by the launching of Sputnik and sponsored by the newly formed National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States and by the Nuffield Foundation in the United Kingdom. The signature goal…