This theme issue of the serial "Educational Foundations" contains five articles devoted to the topic of "Politics and the Schools." In "Resisting Racial Awareness: How Teachers Understand the Social Order from Their Racial, Gender, and Social Class Locations," Christine E. Sleeter discusses the conception of multicultural education of 30 teachers, 26 of whom are white, and concludes that teachers integrate information about race provided in multicultural teacher education programs into the knowledge they already have, much more than they reconstruct that knowledge. Alan Wieder's "Afrocentrisms: Capitalists, Democratics, and Liberationist Portraits" reviews the multidimensional aspects of Afrocentric curricula. Concha Delgado-Gaitan and Nadeen T. Ruiz's "Parent Mentorship: Socializing Children to School Culture" examines three common models of parental involvement programs: (1) family impact model; (2) school impact model; and (3) cooperative system model. In "Dismantling Educational Apartheid: Case Studies from South Africa," Beverly Lindsay explores the results of apartheid on contemporary educational conditions by investigating six local schools in South Africa. In the final article, "Institutional Inertia to Achieving Diversity: Transforming Resistance into Celebration," Nancy P. Greenman, and others, discuss structural barriers to cultural diversity in higher education. (Author/CK)