This paper explores factors affecting the choice of investment in specific human capital in the presence of significant inter-group and spatial inequalities. I use four years of admissions application data at an elite university in South Africa in conjunction with quarterly labor force data to trace the link between aptitude-adjusted expected…

Calls for the decolonisation of higher education in South Africa have been punctuated by comments on black pain. This is not surprising if it is acknowledged that violence inordinately marks so much of South African life. What is rarely discussed though is the idea that pain has also come to be fetishised. Pain, for example, is valued as a…

Since the Supreme Court's 2007 "Parents Involved" decision, school districts have been pursuing integration in more legally and politically charged environments. The retreat of the federal government in the racial integration of schools is well documented, but less understood is what local school districts are doing to fill that void.…

Sixty-five years after the "Brown v. Board" decision, American schools are re-segregated and re-segregating. The mechanisms of this re-segregation are legal action, voluntary moves towards unitary status, unintended consequences of integration-oriented strategies, and an increasing trend towards the fracturing, or splintering of school…

Background: The need for transforming South African education can ultimately be traced to a form of Western subjectivity which dominated Europe since the classical age (1600-1750). The notions of 'discipline' and 'subjectivity' suggest distinct associations with repressive regimes like apartheid, and the present article will argue that the…

Today, our schools are more racially segregated than at any time in the last 40 years, mainly because the neighborhoods in which they are located are themselves racially segregated. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2007 Parents Involved ruling, prohibited school districts from implementing even modest race-conscious desegregation plans. If…

Decades after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling banned mandatory race-based separation of students to different schools, school segregation, and inequality in the United States are rapidly increasing. In this research synthesis, I propose a model for explaining how segregation and inequality are formed in urban and suburban school systems and…

Studies have shown how social media, including Facebook and Twitter, are reshaping communication, news, and information. It is therefore important to explore the role social media plays in student protests and campaigns in order to determine to what extent social media allows participation and audience inclusion during #FeesMustFall and other…

Background/Context: Many states, school districts, and third-party platforms report measures of school performance. Such school ratings are widely consulted by parents and educators alike. The ratings appear to affect families' choices of where to live and where to enroll students (Bergman and Hill, 2018; Hasan and Kumar, 2019), as well as…

Background: This qualitative study examined apartheid-era South Africa, from 1948 to 1994, which established social and administrative policies that deliberately curtailed the education of Indigenous and other South Africans as a means of oppressing non-European ethnic groups. Analysis: In lieu of face-to-face interviews, the experience of…

The segregation enforced during apartheid has not only ensured widely disparate South African university landscapes, but also framed constructions of activism in historical discourses of racial disenfranchisement and marginalisation. As a result, activism is implicitly and explicitly associated with disadvantaged universities; with black students;…

Informed by critical race theory (CRT), we examine how African-American and white college students, at a predominantly white, structurally diverse, Southern US university, understand their cross-racial experiences. Black-white interactions are understood within the context of the so-called 'post-racial' environment, against the backdrop of…

We use linked birth and education records from Florida to investigate how the identification of childhood disabilities varies by race and school racial composition. Using a series of decompositions, we find that black and Hispanic students are identified with disabilities at lower rates than are observationally similar white students. Black…

In this study, we revisit the status of English relative to the African languages in South Africa by analysing new national data on the main language spoken outside the home. These data, which derive from the General Household Surveys of 2017 and 2018, complement commonly collected data on the main language spoken within the home. Our analysis…

South Africa must embark upon the third epoch of education policy after the failures of the first two epochs: the 1953-1994 ("apartheid") era and the 1994-2021 era (the dawn of democracy and the dismantling of apartheid structures). There were not enough education opportunities to guide all the children of the country to maturity and…