This article focuses on the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the USA's broad sweeping federal education policy, in a persistently low-achieving school in which the majority of students are refugees and immigrants. Drawing on a 26-month ethnography, I reveal the ways in which a NCLB-guided school turnaround plan is enacted variably,…

School choice-now a pillar of education reform in the United States-is widely touted as a strategy for addressing educational inequity. Yet efforts to implement school choice can exacerbate, rather than counteract, inequities. "Unaccompanied Minors" takes a close look at the experience of immigrant students and their families navigating…

The development of a series of theoretically based interventions for newcomer (immigrant) parents was undertaken over a 10-year period through an iterative method of designing and analyzing a series of ethnographic studies of its implementation. The results of three such interventions are reported here. The work was based on the critical theory of…

This article examines the implementation of educational policy in a religious education program at a Los Angeles Catholic parish. It charts the elimination of Spanish-based classes ("doctrina") for Mexican immigrant children in favor of "English-only" instruction. The article offers insights into the politics of language use in everyday practice…