The University of Pretoria (UP) adopted an anchor institution strategy and designated the Mamelodi Campus as a faculty with a focus on community engagement with the primary goal of broadening educational pathways to post-secondary school attainment. As a conceptual shift from the community engagement literature, the Mamelodi Campus identifies the…

South Africa is facing the challenge of creating a viable nation from a situation of interplay between diverse racial, ethnic and linguistic forces. This article discusses the implications for education of the evolving picture of language policy as South Africa addresses the task of nation-building. Language policy is important because of its key…

Lecturing can be positively regarded as a practice by which students can be treated with respect in educational processes which grant them freedom to pursue and acquire new knowledge that meets their needs. Lecturing can also be negatively conceived as a practice which others students and positions them as people who deserve to be chided and…

When the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was killed by a white Ferguson police officer in August, researcher Richard Rothstein put his other projects aside to investigate a question that many otherwise well-informed people were asking--Why did this St. Louis suburb so closely resemble the stereotype of an urban ghetto, with pervasive poverty…

Identifying the challenges his students faced both with recall and analysis of the content they had learned for their GCSE course, Ed Durbin devised a solution which focused not on exam skills and revision lessons, but on using Key Stage 3 to build the 'hinterland' of contextual knowledge and causal analysis his students required to make sense of…

Organisational change processes are by nature complex and often highly contested. This is particularly true of the transformation South African institutions of higher education have been going through since the end of the apartheid era. Using a narrative approach, this article presents a multi-faceted range of stories by the University of the Free…

Some sixty years after the 1954 "Brown" decision declared separate schooling inherently unequal, America's student population is much larger and more demographically diverse. For many decades court mandated desegregation plans were implemented, but today public schools are again largely segregated by race, ethnicity, and family…

In light of contemporary school choice proposals and the 60th anniversary of the Southern Manifesto, the Prince Edward County, Virginia public schools crisis provides interesting historical discussion. Prince Edward County (PEC), a rural community in central Virginia, was one of five school districts represented in the 1954 "Brown v. Board of…

"Doing Justice to History" challenges everyday racism in society and offers counter-stories to the singular narratives that still prevail among national historians and in school curricula. It will be a key resource for the annual Black History Month in both the UK and the US. But the book's key purpose is to argue for deeper and…

Realization of a multiracial democracy is challenged like never before by a new era of color-blind politics and postracial supposition, fueled in part by the election of our first black President in 2008, but contradicted by the chronic persistence of racial segregation and social inequality.

Fifty years ago, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." In exploring the story of the events behind the essay, and the Supreme Court case that resulted, "Walker v. Birmingham", 399 U.S. 307 (1967), educators will find a pedagogically powerful lens through which to review the seminal…

Educational choice programs--defined broadly as programs that provide parents with financial aid to help their children opt out of the traditional public school system--are a hallmark of meaningful educational reform. Yet despite widespread news coverage of such programs, polls show most Americans are unfamiliar with how educational choice…

School reform alone cannot substantially improve the performance of the poorest African American students. This performance problem must be addressed primarily by improving the social and economic conditions that bring too many children to school unprepared to take advantage of what schools have to offer. Integrating disadvantaged black students…

In 2014, through the University of the Free State's (UFS) Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice (IRSJ), three South African universities partnered to collaborate on the pilot phase of a research project focused on understanding whether the Arts could enable social cohesion, as the 2012 National Development Plan (2030) had promoted. All…

This document is part of a Bridgespan Group research project that focused on the question: "How could a philanthropist make the biggest improvement on social mobility with an investment of $1 billion?" In answering this question, the authors have sought to understand "what matters most" for improving social mobility outcomes.…