Describes how New York City's African Free School became a focal point of Black community aspirations in the early 1800s and how the Black community struggled, with limited success, to maintain a role in determination of educational policies in the school. (CMG)

Chinese "people-managed schools" began in the 1940s as popular voluntary village schools providing flexible relevant education to rural peasants, but are regarded today as low status and low quality. This change reflects the Chinese Communist Party's incremental move away from both decentralized decision making and populist education to…

More than a century of centralized government and church control of Aboriginal education in Canada, aimed primarily at cultural assimilation, resulted in injustices, widespread inequalities, and underdevelopment. In the 1970s, after much political wrangling, the Canadian federal government and the First Nations agreed upon a policy of Indian…

Among the first of the Model Cities programs, Dayton's program was directed by African American community activists, who instituted important school and neighborhood reforms but blocked efforts to racially desegregate the public schools. The story of Dayton's Model Cities Demonstration Project raises important questions about whether urban renewal…

China's "minban" (people-managed) schooling was an important instrument for delivering educational and political values to poor areas during Mao's era. Despite national policy aimed at eliminating poorly-qualified minban teachers by 2000, rural communities have been reluctant to dismiss such teachers, given the rural teacher shortage and…