This paper examines the choices parents have made regarding language of instruction in their children's classrooms, particularly in California after the implementation of Proposition 227. The data for this study are drawn from a 2-year ethnography of eight Latino families from an urban immigrant Latino community. The parents in the study held a…

Perhaps no school reform has generated as much interest and controversy in recent years as the proposal to have parents select their children's schools. Opponents of school choice fear that rolling back the government's role will lead to profit-driven financial scandals, sectarianism, and increased class and racial isolation. School choice…

Objectification refers to the way in which everything (including human beings) is treated as an object, raw material, or resource to be manipulated and used. In this article, objectification refers to the way that education is often reduced to the packaging and delivery of information. A critique of objectification in instructional technology is…

Teaching at a distance raises ethical issues particular to the distance context. When distance teaching is also online teaching, the situation is even more complex. Online teaching environments amplify the ethical issues faced by instructors and students. Online sites support complex discourses and multiple relationships; they cross physical,…

Why do adolescents and young adults lack a full and coherent understanding of a religion? This is a phenomenon of wide-ranging proportions. Using a cultural, theological, and philosophical analysis, the author argues that one important reason behind the lack of religious content knowledge is the reluctance of teachers to move beyond the…

Objective/Method: Predictors of perceptions of parent-child relationship quality were examined for 175 children with ADHD, 119 comparison children, and parents of these children, drawn from the follow-up phase of the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD. Results/Conclusion: Children with ADHD perceived their mothers and fathers as more…

Drawing on her interviews with professional ghostwriters who work primarily in organizations, the author examines what this practice implies about society's current attitudes toward authorship, written work, and literacy in general. She also examines the ethical arguments that various critics of ghostwriting have made. (Contains 3 notes.)

Public school principals encounter a sizable gap between the autonomy they believe they need to be effective and the autonomy that they actually have in practice, especially when it comes to hiring, firing, and transferring teachers. That is a key finding of this report from the Fordham Institute and the American Institutes for Research, which is…

In composition journals, graduate classrooms, and informal discussions among writing teachers, there is a lot of talk about liberation, empowerment, student voice, dialogue, critical thinking, and democratic teaching--the familiar tropology of critical pedagogy. This nomenclature seems to have permeated the field of composition, across theoretical…

The real world of schools is a political world of power and influence, bargaining and negotiation. Teacher development must therefore take place within the micropolitical realities of schooling. This book describes how the micropolitics of educational leadership affect the working world of teachers and develops four approaches to leadership. Part…

This study used feminist poststructuralist analysis to examine ways in which the relationships between college students and faculty influenced the enactment of feminist teaching. It used open-ended interviews with 22 faculty, the majority of whom were either affiliated with the women's studies program or were in a department in the School of…

A cultural profile of the French-Canadian business community of Quebec is presented, focusing on seven aspects of business communication: language; environment and technology; social organization; degree of contextual understanding; authority conception; nonverbal behavior; and temporal conception. The history of French and English language use in…

A popular image today is that students are "consumers" and teachers are "producers" and "sellers" of education. Many in academia claim that economic metaphors distort and corrupt the true nature of education and they offer a variety of alternative images of the relationships between teachers and students: traveler/guide, worker/boss, artistic…

Within the literacy education community, the focus on decentralizing curriculum decisions, i.e., returning to teachers the authority to make many decisions, including those about which texts to use, has garnered much attention. But the issue is not quite so straightforward, given the power structure currently found in most K-12 educational…

Teachers in "good" schools often provide considerable input into curriculum decisions and other types of school policies. They are considered to be "empowered." This paper argues that the apparent empowerment of teachers in these situations is actually the opposite: In good schools superordinates do not empower teachers; instead, teachers empower…