Given the increasing power of neoliberal and neoconservative agendas in education internationally, critically democratic policies and practices are now even more important. Yet, one of the major problems with critical work in education has been the fact that some of the academic leaders of the "critical pedagogy" movement and of critical and democratic education in general in many nations have not been sufficiently connected to the actual realities of schools and classrooms. Yet, only when it is linked much more to concrete issues of educational policy and practice--and to the daily lives of educators, students, social movements and community members--can a critical and democratic education succeed. I point to a number of such linkages and suggest that because of this the ways we think about the role of education in social transformation needs to be made more nuanced and complex.