Children in under-resourced schools are often subjected to a "pedagogy of poverty," in which their school days consist primarily of independently completing worksheets and preparing for assessments. By contrast, children in more affluent schools often experience engaging, hands-on learning opportunities. This discrepancy is identified as…

Educational inequalities persist between students of low socioeconomic status and their more affluent peers. At the same time, there is evidence of positive relations between student engagement and achievement. This multiple case study investigates a national project aimed at increasing student engagement and achievement through post-COVID-19…

This paper examines the effect of COVID-19 on learning loss and learning inequality in South Africa using 2016 and 2021 Grade 4 PIRLS datasets. On average, South African Grade 4 reading achievement declined by 31 PIRLS points from 320 in 2016 to 288 in 2021, equivalent to a decline of 0.29 standard deviations or 50-60% of a year of learning. The…

In today's climate of polarized racial tension and increasing resegregation in our nation's communities, it is vital to improve the level of education about race and to counter the racism that often exists when white people talk about or interact around race. Two approaches have been identified as helpful: white people learning about race and…

The sociological literature on elite private schooling is frequently informed by Bourdieu's signature concepts of cultural, social and symbolic capital. Yet, his insistence that economic capital is the 'root' of these other capitals is often overlooked or downplayed. This paper addresses this lacuna. While it gestures to Bourdieu's other capitals,…

How much does spending vary across US public schools? And how much do the schools that low-income students attend spend compared to schools attended by their more advantaged peers? Students are educated in schools, which are frequently segregated by race and socioeconomic status, and spending can vary across schools within the same district. But…

Dual Language (DL), a bilingual program has expanded at a rapid rate in New York City. This qualitative study explores choice in three public schools (n = 42) with strand Spanish DL programs to determine the role it plays in middle- and higher-income families' decision making. Factors such as location, pedagogical style, environment, and peer…

This article explores how teachers were discursively positioned in England following the formation of the Coalition government in 2010, using a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 363 speeches produced by government ministers. Findings show that young teachers were privileged in post-2010 government discourse, constructed as valued and…

Intergenerational transmission of disadvantage remains a problem despite political and educational initiatives. This study explored the role of personality and psychosocial factors in occupational status in a survey of 383 participants (174 males and 209 females) over 39 years from age 16 to 55. Mother's education, extraversion, and mastery…

This brief focuses on Colombia which, like most countries globally, closed its schools in March of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As throughout most of Latin America, Colombian schools remained closed for over a year, and they only began to gradually reopen in July 2021. The brief explores the pandemic's impact on student learning by analyzing…

This chapter provides a discussion on elite schools and their students from the current literature and research that has been conducted to date globally and within the South African context, with a particular focus on marginalized students in elite schools -- those who enter these environments from different racial, socioeconomic, cultural and/or…

Previous research has linked demographic shifts in mental health issues among adolescents to a rise in personal expectations and a strong performance imperative, particularly within the educational system. This study aims to understand how early adolescents' experiences of school-related performance demands and their general well-being are…

Intersectionality highlights that different aspects of individuals' identities are not independent of each other. Instead, they interact to create unique identities and experiences, which cannot be understood by analysing each identity dimension separately or in isolation from their social and historical contexts. Intersectional approaches in this…

This study examined the relationship between family wealth and school dropout among vocational education students (n = 1,231; mean age=17.81). It investigated whether (1) family affluence and adolescents' own perceptions and experiences of their family wealth (i.e., perceived family wealth, financial scarcity) predict dropout, (2) adolescents'…

This study illuminates how common holistic admissions practices at so-called "elite" colleges and universities favor high-SES, high wealth applicants through the ways they define and consider "exceptional" performance in extracurricular activities. While many studies have established advantages to high-income applicants based…