The Obama Education Blueprint: Researchers Examine the Evidence

A review of The Obama Education Blueprint: Researchers Examine the Evidence, edited by William Mathis and Kevin Welner (Information Age Publishing, 2010)

Let a Thousand Teachers Bloom. A Response to Creating Communities

Public education in the United States is nominally inclusive and open to all, but is also nuanced and complicated, particularly for students with special learning needs or for English language learners. For refugee students, who may also belong to either or both these two groups, the challenge can be compounded by previous traumas to themselves and their families. Roxas’s description of teacher Patricia Engler illustrates how complicated, but ultimately doable, is the work of educating refugee youth. The key strategy that the article illustrated was the need for attention to connections between school and home life. The students experienced these and other cultural intersections as affirming and consistent, further strengthening the community-school linkages

The Courage to Critique Policies and Practices from Within: Youth Participatory Action Research as Critical Policy Analysis. A Response to “Buscando la Libertad: Latino Youths in Search of Freedom in School”

This response to “Buscando la Libertad: Latino Youths in Search of Freedom in School” by Jason G. Irizarry demonstrates how youth participatory action research (YPAR) as an instrument of subverting oppressive school policies and structures is a form of critical policy analysis (CPA). As an evolving method, CPA acknowledges the absent voices in policy, questions policy inequities, fosters empowerment, and influences policy. Youths who engage in YPAR, as demonstrated by Project FUERTE, have the courage to critique school policies that have the power to alter their educational trajectories, which offers more hope for change than scholarly elites who critique policies from the ivory tower. This response concludes with suggestions for educators. In order for sustainable changes in school policies and structures to occur, youths partaking in YPAR need collaborative support from principals and teachers

Letter from the Editors

An introduction from the editors to volume 19, issue 2 of Democracy & Education

Race to the Top: An Example of Belief-Dependent Reality. A Response to Race to the Top Leaves Children and Future Citizens Behind

Although the federal government claims otherwise, Race to the Top is not research based. Rather, its foundation is in ideology and belief-based realism. The overall effort is fundamentally antiscientific and distracts valuable and needed attention, resources, and focus from the nation\u27s real problems of social, economic, and educational deprivation

Class, Race, and the Discourse of “College for All.” A Response to “Schooling for Democracy”

We critique the “college for all” discourse by unveiling its relationship to the politics of education, the broader economic and political contexts, and the class and race structures embedded in society and schooling, including higher education. We analyze the current and future labor markets to demonstrate the ways that the “college for all” discourse overstates the need for math and science knowledge and skills within the workforce, and we analyze the debt burdens associated with college attendance and completion to demonstrate that the promised benefits of “college for all” are often illusory for low-income, racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students. Thus, we argue that “college for all”—just like “no child left behind” and the “race to the top”—functions as an ideological velvet to soften education policy talk, talk that actually carries big sticks that punish the very students proclaimed to be the beneficiaries of the proposed changes in schooling. The results of schooling practices articulated by the “college for all” discourse are (a) the reinforcement of material barriers to the stated aims of educational access and equity, and (b) the fortification of the class and race status quo. We examine the ways that the transformation of schooling must be linked to the establishment of just social, economic, and political institutions, and to the formation of a citizenry prepared to engage in the struggles for these institutions

A Review of \u3cem\u3eListening to and Learning from Students\u3c/em\u3e

A review of the book Listening to and Learning from Students, edited by Brian Schultz (Information Age Publishing, 2011)