In this article, Sarah Gallo and Holly Link draw on a five-year ethnographic study of Latina/o immigrant children and their elementary schooling to examine the complexities of how children, teachers, and families in a Pennsylvania town navigate learning within a context of unprecedented deportations. Gallo and Link focus on the experiences and…

During the apartheid years in South Africa, career guidance amongst disadvantaged learners was largely absent and, for many, career choices were limited and governed by politics. Despite South Africa having celebrated 20 years of democracy, this situation has improved only slightly. Therefore, the aims of the study were to determine the factors…

This article provides an historical case study of an abortive attempt to revise policy and legislation relating to Religious Education (RE) in English schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing upon published sources, including parliamentary debates, as well as previously unutilised national archival sources from the Department of…

This paper takes up Judith Butler's calls to suspend the desire to completely know the other, and discusses these in relation to the pedagogic relationship in the classroom. It draws upon existing accounts of performative reinscription as a politics to disrupt exclusionary schooling practices and discusses these alongside Butler's theories of…

The impact of parental involvement on school management has been recognized by many education professionals and policy-makers. Thus parental involvement in school education becomes one of the prime focuses in the current education reform movement in Hong Kong. Particularly, specific guidelines and policies for involving parents at various levels…

This study reports on the dilemmas of practice experienced by a parent-school facilitator, Melanie, within a large urban school district. Melanie struggled to reconcile her commitment to families in her school with the demands placed on her by an administrative ideology that viewed families as adversaries. Her attempts to manage the conflicts…

Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) with their origins in OECD literature, propose to revolutionise education as we know it. ILEs draw on a large body of literature: constructivist learning theory; distributed leadership; personalised 21st century learning; blended learning (digital); and, future-focused education. Despite an increasing body…

Social work values prioritize the needs of vulnerable and oppressed populations that face social problems and political inequalities. Gifted students do not intuitively fall within this framework. This article describes the treatment of gifted students in American public schools as a vulnerable and oppressed population needing differentiated…

Public and scholarly debates on what it means to be a successful teacher are characterized by increasingly pronounced differences in how various political, legislative, and professional groups define successful teaching. In response to pressures posed by these polarized discourses, critical pedagogic research on education contrasts contested views…

The University of California became a "public trust" in 1879 as part of a larger revision of California's Constitution approved by California voters. The University henceforth gained the exclusive power to operate, control, and administer the University of California, becoming virtually a fourth branch of state government, a…

The purpose of this study is to explore the programmatic changes that occurred in the Educational Opportunity Centers (EOC) and how those changes influenced educational opportunities for adults. A case study design was used for this investigation. The directors of three EOCs were selected and interviewed for the study. These directors combined…

This paper presents selected findings from a historical analysis of change in the discursive construction of social identity in UK education policy discourse from 1972-2005. My chief argument is that through its linguistic forms of self-identification the government construes educational roles, relations and responsibilities not only for itself,…

A district is as stable and grounded as its superintendent, according to some leaders and education experts. And given findings in a recent report from the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS), which specifically states that the average tenure of urban superintendents increased from 2.3 years in 1999 to 3.6 years in 2010, an increase of 56…

In this paper I outline an approach towards policy analysis that takes governmentality as its point of theoretical orientation and begin to apply this approach to my research into the recently raised compulsory school-leaving age in Western Australia. I aim to demonstrate the methodological potentials of this approach by giving examples of the…

Where their teacher-quality proposals are concerned, the fates of the 11 states that have bid for waivers of core principles of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act appear to depend largely on how the peer reviewers--and, ultimately, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan--interpret their applications. The U.S. Department of Education's criteria…