Narrative inquiry into (re)imagining alternative schools: a case study of Kevin Gonzales.

Although there are many alternative schools that strive for the successful education for their students, negative images of alternative schools persist. While some alternative schools are viewed as “idealistic havens,” many are viewed as “dumping grounds,” or “juvenile detention centers.” Employing narrative inquiry, this article interrogates how a student, Kevin Gonzales, experiences his alternative education and raises questions about the role of alternative schools. Kevin Gonzales’s story is presented in a literary form of biographical journal to provide a “metaphoric loft” that helps us imagine other students like Kevin. This, in turn, provokes us to examine our current educational practice, and to (re)imagine ways in which alternative education can provide the best possible educational experiences for disenfranchised students who are increasingly underserved by the public education system

Global education policies and taken-for-granted rationalities: Do the poor respond to policy incentives in the same way?

Investing in education opens up the possibility of breaking the intergenerational cycle of the reproduction of poverty and guarantees a long‐term strategy to reduce poverty. Beyond the economic and political reasons for the globalization of demand‐side interventions, the transnationalization of these policies also carries a process of globalization of the assumed responses of actors to policy incentives. In the policy domain, rationality debates are especially relevant because policies always convey an explicit or implicit understanding of human behavior. Instrumental rationality has been assumed as the only possible rationality of the poor, and their expected and predictable reactions to policy incentives are at the heart of the theory of change of demand‐side education policies. Neoclassical economists have been able to adapt their understanding of the rationality of the poor to non‐perfect situations