In 2009, a seldom-used policy lever emerged in the form of a competitive grant program, Race to the Top (RTTT), and sparked a flurry of state-led initiatives as states vied for federal dollars. The current study examines the policymaking context that surrounded these events and propelled Tennessee to the top of the race among the states. Through…

This article examines the ways in which citizenship status uniquely shapes both the access and persistence of undocumented community college students in the Central Valley of California. Drawing on more than 2 years of qualitative fieldwork, it is argued that undocumented community college students navigate an institutional landscape of…

In this paper, we draw attention to the impact of neoliberal globalisation in rearticulating conceptions of equity within the Ontario context. The Ontario education system has been hailed for its top performance on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a high-equity/high-quality education system and created "PISA envy"…

This article makes contributions to questions of why international transfers of programmes do not lead to the outcomes that nations engaging in them expect to gain. Using Bahrain as an example, it is argued that tensions arising from policy borrowing are rooted in the complexities of the political incoherence between the new teaching policies, the…

Pro-market and business approaches to management in the public sector (new public management--NPM) have created an audit culture in schools driven by top-down, high stakes accountability, and the fetishization of data. Within this context, authentic, qualitative, and democratic forms of inquiry, both in universities and schools, become easily…

Geographic place and socio-political space are salient in struggles for justice in education. Social geography provides a frame for discussing the relationship between names of schools and narratives of race, place, and justice (racial and spatial) in the US South. Featured herein is an illustrative case of how a school named after an African…

Culturally responsive or place-based school mathematics that focuses on Indigenous students has an established presence in the research literature. This culture-based innovation represents a historical shift from conventional approaches to mathematics education. Moreover, it has demonstratively advanced the academic achievement for both Indigenous…

Over the past decade, multiple states have implemented a form of regional school district consolidation referred to as multi-district unions. Their organizational structure enables districts to retain individual school boards within regional local education agencies, all of which are overseen by a superintendent and a central board. However, no…

The article is written within the framework of a broader study investigating school and university representation in the Soviet/Russian and foreign audiovisual media texts. The research outlines that in Soviet cinema the image of the female teacher was transformed in the following sequence: a heroine-revolutionary; a heroine of hard work; an…

This state-of-the-art review is based on the fundamental idea that political economy should be adopted as a frame for research and discussion in applied linguistics as part of a general social turn which has taken hold in the field over the past three decades. It starts with Susan Gal's (1989) early call for such a move in sociolinguistics and…

This paper explores changes to the educational policy-making arena through case study analysis of a Massachusetts law passed in 2012 that limits seniority-based job protections for public K-12 teachers. I use data from interviews with policy stakeholders, observations of public meetings, and policy artifacts to explore struggles over democratic…

This paper uses Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis to interrogate concepts of social justice in relation to the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism by referring to the work of the Situationist International movement, the posthuman philosophy of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as Afrofuturism. Providing an array of new theoretical responses as…

Boundary lines have long served as a mechanism to divide people, determining the quality of available resources, and ultimately, educational opportunity. In recent years, new school district boundaries have proliferated as local communities attempt to secede from larger school districts. In this study of Memphis-Shelby County, Tennessee, we extend…

Schools do not receive much recognition within urban sociological research for the role they perform in shaping the demographic, structural, and social features of neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan areas. In contrast, this article links schools, and the racial avoidance that operates through educational policy, to the extreme economic…

This article reconstructs the story behind "Freeman v. Pitts" (1992), one of the main US Supreme Court cases that made it easier for school districts to terminate court desegregation orders and that, in turn, helped to propel a widely documented trend: the resegregation of southern schools. The case in part hinged on the question of…