The Education Act 2011 passed responsibility for careers guidance in England from local authorities to schools, providing no extra funding or staff training. This paper reports on a project conducted in two schools in East London, which aimed to enhance careers work in response to the new requirements. It argues that whilst schools can enhance…

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the commonsensical acceptance of commitments to excellence within postsecondary education and reveal their inherent neoliberal foundation. Because excellence appears neutral, natural, universal, and a legitimate educational goal, it obfuscates the embedded assumptions that undergird the material practices…

This article notes that the attempt to include all young people in education, an aim of Labour governments over the years, still relies on an expanded and expensive special educational needs "industry". How to include all lower attainers and those with disabilities in the education system and the economy is a political issue for a Labour…

This article draws on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to consider, from an ethical perspective, the current transparency and accountability agenda in Australian schooling. It focuses on the case of the "My School" website and the argument that transparent publication of comparative performance data via the website provides a basis for…

This theoretical article draws from the political thought of Jacques Rancière to trouble some taken-for-granted conceptions of citizenship education. Rancière's notion of politics and dissensus (as opposed to consensus) can lay the groundwork for a version of citizenship that challenges what is deemed sensible, visible, who is counted in…

In the United States, bilingual education continues to provoke fierce debate. It seems that nearly everyone--from educators to policymakers to parents with school-age children to those without children--has a strong opinion on whether children with little fluency in English should be taught academic content in their home language as they learn…

This article reviews the influence of liberal ideas on the capacity for Religious Education (RE) to consider religions critically in a climate of increasing government intervention in education. It finds that criticality in some areas of RE is absent or limited but that in key areas criticality is evident if not always deeply embedded. It…

Even as states made educational advances in recent years, they have often struggled to close achievement gaps between white students and students of color and between wealthier and poorer students. Arkansas is a state that has unquestionably made great strides in overall educational adequacy since the Arkansas Supreme Court made a stream of…

As the first mayor in the United States to possess independent charter school authorizing authority, Mayor Bart Peterson oversaw the establishment and expansion of Indianapolis's ambitious charter school initiative. In 2007, Democratic Mayor Peterson's oversight of the initiative came to an end when he was unexpectedly defeated by Republican…

As part of the general "greening" of prisons in the last decade of neoliberalization and the formation of institutionalized programs to provide science and environmental education opportunities for the incarcerated, the Sustainability in Prisons Project (SPP), a partnership between Evergreen State College and the Washington State…

This article uses postcolonial scholarship to understand the knowledge and cultural politics that underpin Australian-provided transnational higher education (TNHE) programmes in Singapore and Malaysia. A case is made for TNHE practices to develop an "engaged pedagogy" and "ethics of care" as it relates to transnational…

For centuries, teachers have complained about their salaries. In the Stapfer inquiry of 1799, some teachers made remarks about financial issues, particularly their low incomes. This inquiry is the main source for the arguments presented here regarding teachers' low salary during this period of the Helvetic Republic. The disparity between the…

The project we highlight in this article stems from our philosophical work on moral disagreements that appear to be--and sometimes are--intractable. Deliberative democratic theorists tout the merits of dialogue as an effective way to bridge differences of values and opinion, ideally resulting in agreement, or perhaps more often resulting in…

Once considered a strategy to support working parents with child care needs, the majority of states now view access to high-quality preschool programs as a critical long-term economic investment in the future workforce. For the third year in a row both Republican and Democratic policymakers made significant investments in state-funded pre-K…

Political realities dictate that, as with any tests, passing scores on those developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) will be set at a level that avoids having an unacceptable number of students fail. Since Massachusetts is by far the highest performing of the states that remain in the PARCC…