"Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) was a landmark decision that was the result of decades of efforts by grassroots activists and civil rights organizations to end legalized segregation. A less well-known effort challenged the extralegal segregation of Mexican American students in the Southwest. I combine original research and research…

Closing achievement gaps--disparities in academic achievement between minority and white students, and between low-income and higher-income students--has long been an unrealized goal of U.S. education policy. It has now been 60 years since the Supreme Court declared "separate but equal" schools unconstitutional in "Brown v. Board of…

The fight for equal educational opportunity in New York has followed a pattern similar to other diverse or racially transforming states. From the 1950s to 1980s, the issue of school desegregation was an important issue. Local civil rights pressure, the courts, and legislation attempted to desegregate large urban school systems through both…

A series of policy shifts over the past decade promises to change how Americans decide where to send their children to school. In theory, the expanded use of standardized test scores and the boom in charter schools will allow parents to evaluate their assigned neighborhood school, or move in search of a better option. But what kind of data do…

This study carries out a comparative analysis of achievement according to gender between mixed and single-sex schools in the region of Catalonia, Spain, for the subjects of Spanish, Catalan, English and Mathematics. After a brief contextualisation, a review of the main findings from international studies on differences in results for mixed schools…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced the No Child Left Behind Act with great fanfare and enthusiasm. Granting more power to states and curbing what was seen as federal overreach was well received. However, the new legislation maintains a predominately test-based accountability system with a federal mandate for interventions in well over…

In 1933, Ethel Thompson Overby became the first African American female principal in Richmond, Virginia. Her motto was "It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness" (Overby 1975, 1). Before becoming principal, Overby had been a teacher in the southern urban "de jure" segregated schools of the city. How did the…

Neighborhood schools engender the idea that schools can be integral community centers, with learning facilitated by the personal relationships developed among teachers, administrators, students, and parents. Neighborhood schools also have represented stigmatized segregated spaces located in communities with high poverty rates, low high school…

As the demographic make-up of public schools (and neighborhoods) shift and schools become increasingly segregated, the role of school boards becomes critically important in maintaining policies designed to remedy segregation and promote equal opportunity, policies which may challenge the status quo. Specifically, in school districts and…

Public school curriculum battles offer great examples for illustrating how politics saturates education policy, particularly in the State of Texas. However, Arizona has emerged as another peculiar contender in contemporary battles to control high school curricula. Curriculum battles have deep historical roots in Arizona and elsewhere that go…

In this paper, the authors investigate the consequences of curricular intensification by examining changes in the social organization of schooling and student achievement in one California school district. The authors' analyses consider the following three research questions: (1) What effect did 8th grade curricular intensification have on…

The arrival over the last 15 years of a substantial number of pupils of immigrant origin has presented Catalan schools with significant challenges. The schools in Vic (70 km north of Barcelona) have been at the forefront of attempts to adjust to this new multicultural reality. This article describes the results of three studies carried out by the…

Data from three school admissions surveys and the National Pupil Database are combined to investigate whether changes to the School Admissions Code appear to have altered the published admissions policies and the social composition of particular schools. We show that the 2003 and 2007 School Admissions Codes appear to have been at least in part…

This article shows how the Catalan government has not developed an agenda to tackle school segregation despite the growing number of migrant pupils who arrived over the course of the last decade. Education policy has explicitly disregarded the possibilities of improving the regulatory framework for tackling segregation; it has exercised…

The issues facing Travellers, including those associated with education are often linked to social exclusion, widespread disadvantage and discrimination (Reynolds, McCartan, and Knipe 2003). The Office for Standards in Education (Office for Standards in Education 1999) referred to Gypsy Traveller pupils as "the most at risk in the education…