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Books for and in schools are commodities. They form a central part of the political economy of publishing. They are also, profoundly, sites of cultural and ideological conflict. While always there, there are periods when these economic and ideological conflicts are even more powerful. This is just such a time. This reality asks us to also examine places in school buildings that might (often wrongly) seem to some people to be "less important." Among these places is the school library as a resource, a teaching device, an access point to things seen as controversial, a mirror of conflicts and economic and political transformations, and for many students, at times a sanctuary. American Public School Librarianship: A History provides us with a richly sourced account of the development of a key pedagogic site in schools and of many of the personal, institutional, and political reasons why they do—and do not do—certain things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I examined many of the major arguments for social justice teacher unionism. This combines both more traditional union concerns over wages, working conditions, professional autonomy, and respect with a much more concerted focus by unions on social justice issues in schools, communities, and the larger society. The importance of such a commitment and what it actually looks like is evident in the book under discussion here. Teacher Unions and Social Justice is one of a deservedly well-respected and growing series of volumes published by Rethinking Schools. The entire series constitutes substantive contributions to some of the most significant and contentious issues facing deeply committed educators. Through books such as Teacher Unions and Social Justice and other important publications, Rethinking Schools provides us with ways of combining the professional, political, and personal aspects of our lives and of coming together to build thicker forms of critically democratic education to defend a more robust vision of the common good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost all of the discussions surrounding educational policy focus their attention on particular places, especially various kinds of formal schooling. While this focus is of course crucial, it tends to ignore other educational sites where acts of teaching go on and where challenges to accepted understandings are waged. These include libraries and the topic of this essay, museums. Creating the Creation Museum clearly documents why such sites are worthy of our most serious attention. The book is a substantive contribution in a number of ways. It offers important critical insights about the Museum and its overt role in "advancing a long standing movement goal: advancing the cultural authority of creation science." It also provides us with an expanded set of methodological tools for engaging in such work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is one of two which bring together leading educational researchers to consider some of the key challenges facing democracy and education during the twenty-first century, including rising social and economic inequality, political instability, and the existential threats of global pandemics and climate change. In this paper, key educational scholar–activists respond to the challenges and possibilities for democracy and education, with consideration of the importance of reimagining education as being for democracy. The questions asked in this paper have particular salience for educational leaders, who must be at the centre of any commitment to democratic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This article compares national standards for area measurements of healthcare facilities in four countries and examines the risks and differences that can arise when comparing building areas of healthcare facilities internationally. Background: In the planning and management of healthcare facilities, the utilization and comparison of building floor areas plays a major role. Differences in terminology, classification, and methodology help to reduce planning and cost risks when applied on a local and national level. The proper allocation of building floor space is vital in the design of room programs, determination of floor space, construction costs, and operating costs. Methods: Each of the four hospital area measurement standards is compared to discern similarities and differences. Results: Most countries use a three-tier system of hospital area measurement: building gross area, department gross area, and department net area. Few differences were found between country standards for department area, though the German standards do not fully address this tier. Variation is found in whether a country includes certain functions in the hospital area—such as research space, shell space, or central energy plants—which can have a significant impact on the overall hospital area. Conclusions: This article informs further development of individual country standards and highlights principles to consider for international hospital area comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In my Reviewing Policy section of this journal I have often analyzed a number of significant books that focus on other nations. Such an international agenda is important. Analytically such a wider perspective provides fresh insights into the lenses we employ to understand crucial sets of social relations that are created by and create educational and larger dynamics. This international view has now taken a very interesting turn with the publication of Paul Willis's newest book, Being Modern in China: A Western Cultural Analysis of Modernity, Tradition and Schooling in China Today. At the center of his analysis is the public school and especially the power of the national examinations in China as both structures that divide populations but also as powerful devices that embody identities both now and in the future. But it is much more than this. With its primary focus on both commodified and lived youth cultures, the book constitutes a substantive contribution to the questioning of the orthodox view of economic determinism within the political economy of education. Given this, it is definitely worth reading the book, but it is important to remember that this is indeed a "western" analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While some members of the critical education community(ies) may disagree, I think that it is imperative to read and learn from those groups of educators who may not have exactly the same politics as I do. A case in point is the book under discussion in this essay. It focuses on multiple on-the-ground initiatives that seek to provide more responsive schooling through community-school partnerships and through creating an entire range of social, health-related, and educational services that can give us a sense of possibilities. These programs also have the potential to open the door to further democratizing movements and policies that are key elements for critically oriented educational policies and practices. Thus, even though I wanted a more critical understanding of the structural issues involved in why schools often produce inequalities, the book is still a real contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I documented the importance of the work of Stuart Hall in the development of critical theories in education, in our understanding of "race," and in the development of much more nuanced analyses of cultural politics. I focused on two books: Familiar Stranger, Hall's personal memoir of political and cultural commitment; and Cultural Studies 1983, his lectures that provided the conceptual and political basis for a good deal of critical and nonreductive social and cultural analyses of the relationship between economic dynamics and structures and the rest of society. The two new books I discuss in the current essay provide us with a selection of many of the core reasons why he has been so influential in an entire range of critically oriented work in sociology, cultural studies, theories of race, "multiculturalism," and identity, and increasingly in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The study aims to investigate what design practitioners and healthcare facility managers deem as important benchmarking metrics worldwide, investigating country differences in benchmarking usage and which metrics are prioritized. Background: Benchmarking is a regular practice in the healthcare sector, both for clinical and managerial aspects to compare, measure, and improve standardized processes. However, limited knowledge is available about benchmarking procedures in hospital planning, design, and construction. Methods: A web-based survey was designed, revised, and pilot-tested in five countries; it was adjusted according to local experts' suggestions and submitted globally via SoSci multilingual platform to persons involved in hospital design, research, construction, and facility management. It was composed of closed questions on 5-point Likert-type scale ranking frequency or importance and open-ended questions divided into six sections. Two hundred and eighty full responses have been collected. Statistical analysis was performed via PowerBI and R-Studio, while qualitative analysis was performed via MAXQDA. Results: The findings reported allow for both specific insights per each country or category as well as enabling general considerations of a practice that is becoming always more international with 30%–50% of respondents working in the international context. The evaluation of the survey highlights the most important benchmarks, among others. For example, for respondents from the top five countries (Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the United States), the most important metric for benchmark comparability is whether the project was new construction, new construction attached to an existing hospital, or interior renovation. Construction date, client type (public vs. private), and country of location were also generally rated as the most important metrics by respondents. Other metrics that were consistently rated as important globally included inpatient unit layout, walking distances, number of floors, and whether all patient rooms are private. Space-related metrics are considered very important elements in the design and planning of healthcare facilities worldwide. Regarding cost-related metrics, all countries consider the ratio construction cost per building gross area as the most important. Conclusions: Benchmarking emerges as a relevant tool for hospital design and planning as it can support efficiency, standardization, and confidence; currently, benchmarking is still underutilized due to the challenge of international comparison, access to data outside each specific company, and variation design metrics nationally. Benchmarking strategies should be further investigated to support knowledge exchange and to ensure reliable and comparable information globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

However, in the United States and in many other nations, religious support for critical democracy, for anti-racist, non-homophobic, and more robust and thick participatory forms of public institutions, including schools, have been essential to building and defending more progressive policies and in cementing alliances to defend them (Apple et al. [6]). These gains are under threat currently with the growth in power of rightist movements, including very conservative and powerful evangelical movements that receive considerable amounts of funding from similar movements in the United States. Yet, just as importantly, while the homeschooling movement is varied, in all too many cases it functions as the creation of ideological "gated communities" in which the culture and body of the "Other" are seen as forms of pollution that must be avoided at all costs (Apple [2]; see also Kintz [12]). [Extracted from the article]

Truly substantive progressive transformations that stand the test of time require organized pressure from below, especially from groups who demand that our institutions act in more responsive ways around what Nancy Fraser calls the politics of distribution, recognition, and representation. The Fight for America's Schools is guided by exactly this insight. It presents us with detailed descriptions and analyses of grassroots organizing that acts back against a number of the largely neoliberal educational policies that are having all too many negative effects in education. The book's investigation of grassroots movements focuses on Philadelphia and its suburbs and on Camden, Newark, and other places in New Jersey. In this essay review, I discuss the power and contradictions of populist mobilizations and point to the ways this book offers a valuable resource in understanding progressive ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In my comments on this fine collection of critical policy analyses, I want to do a number of things. I shall point to the general conceptual and social orientation and commitments that provide the foundation for such research. I will then describe a number of contributions that these papers make. And finally, I shall suggest a number of areas where additional critical investigations could make a significant contribution to our understanding. I hope that I will be forgiven if, at times, I refer to my own work. But many of the arguments I will make in this essay require much more detailed treatments, ones in which I have engaged elsewhere. Thus, these references to my own lengthier analyses may serve as a shorthand pointer to the larger discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I share a number of thoughts and concerns about the current and future status of a field in which I have been a participant for five decades. I know that many others share these worries as well. Speaking honestly, I am deeply concerned that too much of the field of curriculum has lost its way. Too much of it is characterized by a condition of historical amnesia. It has too often forgotten the key questions about what and whose knowledge should be official. It has become lost in postmodern abstractions and deconstructive despair. It is hermetic in too many ways and has in the process lost its ability to speak clearly about some major problems facing schools, teachers, students and communities. With neoliberal, neoconservative, authoritarian populist, and new managerial forces increasingly occupying the space of real policies and practices, we have little voice in the public debates over the realities of schooling and the decisions of curriculum policies and practices. The field of education deserves more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics of collective memory, over what counts as “official knowledge,” is crucial in education. With its primary focus on the politics of memory and how this works in the politics of school knowledge as its primary focus, Civil Rights Culture Wars gives us a rich historical picture of this process as it played out in a significant battle over a specific textbook in Mississippi. As some readers may already know, there have been a large number of interesting case studies of textbook controversies over the years, as well as a long history of studies that critically focus on the political and educational issues surrounding textbooks. As Eagles documents in great detail, this book became a center of ideological conflict and many conservative groups were clear that they would seek to block its approval. The conflict over the book in the courts, in the press, and in government agencies took years. There were defeats, partial victories, and then ultimately a vindication. Even though the implications of his analysis to more general issues of political and cultural theory are always there, Eagles’s account is not about the abstraction called the “state.” It reads more like an anguished drama, filled with real characters, biographies, and movements, from the authors of the textbook themselves, to state legislators, to educational administrators and state textbook adoption commission members, to judges, to members of the public who held varied political positions on the battle over inclusion and exclusion, over the epistemological fog, amnesia and memory, and so much more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to articles on range of topics around analyses of history, culture, politics, authority structures, state formation are presented.

In this essay, I first discuss where the article “Doing Things the ‘Right’ Way” that was published in this journal in 2005 fits into my corpus of work. In many ways, it represents a coming together of the various influences that have continued to form me over the nearly five decades I have been engaged in critically examining the relationship between educational theories, policies and practices, and differential power. Like many others, my work has been guided by two major goals: understanding and interrupting dominance. This has required that we become more nuanced in our critical analyses of the dynamics of power and the agents who wield it and that we not be satisfied with simplistic slogans that may be effective for rallying opposition but are much less effective at determining tactics and spaces of possibility. Thus, my aim is not only to both grasp and counter dominant policies and practices, but also to engage in fraternal criticism of what I take to be overly simplistic work by some parts of the Left as well. Given the increasing power of neoliberal, neoconservative, authoritarian populist and new managerial policies in education and the larger society, I next critically examine how and why the Right is ascendant. Finally, I detail a range of crucial tasks in which the critical scholar/activist in education should engage if we are to respond to these conditions in politically and ethically robust ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Educational policy in a number of nations has stressed the importance of STEM and advanced mathematics. This article examines Andrew Hacker’s analysis of the uncritical acceptance of STEM and advanced mathematics and of its empirical, epistemological, political, and educational assumptions. Although I support Hacker’s claims, I also raise a number of questions about some of his own assumptions and arguments. On the whole, however, The Math Myth is an important book, one that should be read by both supporters of STEM in curriculum and teaching and by those who are deeply concerned about its dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including educational administration, educational leadership, and education history.

In England, we might say that “the Empire has come home.” This means that while racism and the processes of racialization are indeed extraordinarily powerful, there will not only be strong similarities between say the United States and England but also significant differences in how these things play out both now and in the past. This is one of the reasons that The Colour of Class is important reading for U.S. researchers.What The Colour of Class gives us is a creative rearticulation and use of theories that when put together illuminate how race and class interact. In the process, it simultaneously presents us with a much more detailed and clear understanding of how the Black middle class creatively uses its various resources, and works assiduously to gain legitimacy for the resources it possesses, as it creatively seeks in education and the larger society to “make its own history in conditions it hasn’t chosen.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views regarding neoliberalism relevance for education. Topics discussed include common sense about education being altered by dominant discourse and policies, conservative modernization being composed of authoritarian populist religious conservatives, homeschooling being the fastest-growing educational movements in the U.S. and role of curriculum struggles in formation of counter-hegemonic and hegemonic movements.

STEM Education Reform in Urban High Schools critically examines the reality of STEM at a school level in the United States. In essence, its fundamental questions include: What actually happens in schools—and especially to students—when STEM becomes the prime focus? What happens to STEM itself? Given the intense pressures on schools, does STEM often become largely rhetorical? When there are different results, what structures, resources, and commitments explain this? The focus is on two cities—Buffalo and Denver—and on schools that have large populations of minoritized students. In this essay, I discuss the contributions that the authors make to our understandings of the complex and contradictory realities of STEM education. At the same time, I also point to a number of the criticisms of the often uncritical acceptance of STEM and STEAM educational policies and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the increasingly global nature of marketized school choice policies, this makes it even more crucial to investigate how the multiple scales, forms, and emphases of school choice in different countries are influenced by particular political, economic, and cultural conditions. While much of the critical research on school choice policies has focused on examining the complex processes of school choice in the education market in Western contexts, this essay review of School Choice in China applies Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and conversion strategies to demonstrate the practices of market-based parental choice in China.The essay highlights the importance of the recontextualization of school choice within the Chinese historical, political, economic, and social landscape in order to better understand how choice policy is interpreted differently in the Chinese context. Such historical and social specificities include, but are not limited to, the Chinese government’s insufficient investment in education, the existing key school system, and significant social class changes in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insight regarding the relationship between capitalism, inequality, and education and Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." He seeks to examine Piketty's contribution on whether it offers an opportunity to restore, keep alive, and extend previous accomplishments in neo-Marxist as well ass other traditions in the critical sociology of class, gender, and race both in education and social analysis in general.

Organizations must evaluate their infection control plans in a holistic and inclusive manner to continue reducing healthcare-associated infection (HAI) rates, including giving consideration to the manner of collecting and disposing of patient waste. Manual washing of bedpans and other containers poses a risk of spreading infection via caregivers, the environment, and the still-contaminated bedpan. Several alternative disposal methods are available and have been tested in some countries for decades, including options such as bedpan washer–disinfector machines, macerator machines, and disposable bedpans. This article reviews methods and issues related to human waste disposal in healthcare settings. Healthcare organizations must evaluate the options thoroughly and then consistently implement the option most in line with its goals and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much of the critical scholarship around elite schooling has focused on the students who attend elite institutions, their social class locations, privileged habituses and cultural capital, this paper foregrounds curricular form itself as a central mechanism in the (re)production of elites. Using Basil Bernstein's conceptual framework of pedagogic codes, this paper depicts how one of the most high-status forms of school knowledge – critical thinking – is taught in both an elite as well as a mainstream secondary school in Singapore. It argues that even as, or more accurately, precisely because the Singapore Ministry of Education emphasizes the teaching of critical thinking in all schools and to all students, how such knowledge is presented and performed in the school curriculum becomes crucial in differentiating elites from mainstream students. Findings suggest that whereas the pedagogic codes in the mainstream school remain oriented towards an instrumental rationality and the fulfillment of external and profane market exigencies, in the elite school they invoke a rationality that is inward-looking, personalized and that encourages the development of narcissistic, sacred identities. This paper concludes by considering how curricular form itself functions as a non-neutral mechanism for the transmission of educational knowledge, and the ways in which, in Singapore's highly stratified society where meritocracy functions as a key principle of governance, the elite identities that accrue from such a curricular form further entrench the political legitimacy of a “meritorious” class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All educational reforms have particular histories. And all of them are driven not only by technical considerations but also profoundly by cultural, political, and economic projects and by ideological visions of what schools should do. In this contribution to my Reviewing Policy section of Educational Policy, I discuss a significant contribution to our understanding of these projects. “Academic Success and Social Power” focuses on the growth of crucial aspects of a number of these visions, on the conflicts that they often entail, and on who continues to benefit the most from them over time. Richard Teese directs most of his attention to the reform of curriculum and to the social field of power that determines or at least sets limits on what is considered important knowledge. In the process, what he has produced can serve as a model for how critical education studies of culture and power should go on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the most important questions critical educators can ask today are the following: Can schools play a role in making a more just society possible? If not, why not? If so, what can they do? These questions provide the basis for this article by Michael Apple, as well as for the books under discussion here. The books by David Blacker, John Marsh, Mike Cole, and Pauline Lipman discussed in this essay are either Marxist, have been influenced by Marxist and socialist ideas, or are published by presses that have a long history of publishing material with a Marxist and/or socialist orientation. In order to adequately deal with them, Apple devotes much of this essay to a set of arguments about the possibilities and limits of these ideas. After specifying those arguments, he discusses how they are developed in the books themselves. He grounds this discussion in a call for creating a broader 'we' that is based on a more historically grounded understanding of the ways in which struggles over schooling actually can make a difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stuart Hall had a significant impact on critical analyses of rightist mobilizations in education. This is very visible in my own work, for example, in such volumes asOfficial Knowledge(2014) andEducating the ‘Right’ Way(2006). After describing an important series of lectures that Stuart Hall gave at the Havens Center for Social Structure and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I detail the nonessentialist position that served as the grounding of Hall's own discussion of race, ideology, and conjuncture, and how it affected so much of the critical examination of neoliberal and neoconservative reconstructions of education. In the context of laying out the tasks of the ‘critical scholar/activist in education,’ I then portray what we can learn from Hall about the role of the organic intellectual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourdieu’s version of field theory has had an impressive impact on the ways that sociologists of education conceptualize educational practices. These accounts tend to focus on the varying levels of ontological complicity established between students’ cultural dispositions and educational institutions. In this paper, the wisdom of these accounts is acknowledged but it is also suggested that Bourdieu’s field theory does not go far enough to detail the ways that positions in local educational fields embody pedagogic qualities and action trajectories. Drawing on insights from social psychology and relational sociology, a field theory for local educational action is outlined that more adequately accounts for the ways that students and educators directly experience and act upon curricular and pedagogic qualities in educational settings. An empirical example is then offered of the authors’ claims within the context of curricular tracking/streaming, and the article concludes by considering the practical and political consequences of this theoretical shift. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the years that I have been writing the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I have paid particular attention to critical conceptual and empirical work that either overtly supports or directly challenges the taken-for-granted assumptions that tend to guide dominant policies in education. These policies may deal with larger issues involving the relations among education, politics, and the economy or those surrounding the more “on the ground” realities of curricula, teaching, and evaluation. One of my key concerns has been the complex ways in which differential power works on and through education. In examining these issues, I have at times turned to books that, while they are not based on material from the United States, still have important things to say to researchers in the United States. The book I shall discuss in this essay provides another example of why this is important. It is written from an Irish context. But it raises more general and quite substantive questions about the ways in which neoliberalism and its accompanying assemblage of mechanisms of audit culture actually work and how the ways they work privilege particular groups. Gender is the primary focus of New Managerialism in Education; but though in itself that is of crucial importance internationally, the implications are also wider than that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines a US public elementary bilingual, multicultural school that attempts to interrupt the reproduction of existing relations of dominance and subordination across a variety of differences. The school’s experiences illuminate the complex reality of schools as a site of struggle and compromise between at times contradictory interests, agents, and ideologies and the powerful forces in the (racial) state and civil society that make educating for social equality and justice difficult to accomplish. The article considers the concessions the school has made, and how and why, even in this most antiracist of schools, issues of race and racism persist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

OBJECTIVE: This study investigates how design strategies in three recent intensive care units in Sweden impact patients, families, and staff. The area of focus is the patient room "module," usually consisting of a pair of patient rooms and a joint location for monitoring and documentation. BACKGROUND: Many countries are expanding their number of intensive care beds and are also in the process of incorporating evidencebased design strategies such as single-bed patient rooms and access to daylight and nature. This situation provides a significant opportunity to review and learn from facilities leading the way in these areas. METHODS: Three intensive care units completed since 2010 were evaluated in relation to a combination of criteria. Methods included plan drawing analysis, staff questionnaires (n = 72), staff interviews (n = 9), and systematic observation (6 hours).RESULTS: In some patient rooms, access to daylight and/or outdoor views was excellent, while in other rooms such access was hindered by frosted glass or adjacent bushes or buildings. Single-bed rooms gave family members improved privacy and greater ability to stay in the patient room. Some patient room modules provided efficient patient observation and staff collaboration, but more noise and reduced patient privacy. Other modules provided a calm patient room environment, but caused some staff to feel isolated and have difficulty in getting assistance. CONCLUSIONS: The evaluation of the three projects reveals variation in whether design strategies successfully achieve their desired outcomes. Varying designs of the patient room module affect users in unique ways and must balance privacy, visibility, quietness, and staff access to assistance.OBJECTIVE: This study investigates how design strategies in three recent intensive care units in Sweden impact patients, families, and staff. The area of focus is the patient room "module," usually consisting of a pair of patient rooms and a joint location for monitoring and documentation. BACKGROUND: Many countries are expanding their number of intensive care beds and are also in the process of incorporating evidencebased design strategies such as single-bed patient rooms and access to daylight and nature. This situation provides a significant opportunity to review and learn from facilities leading the way in these areas. METHODS: Three intensive care units completed since 2010 were evaluated in relation to a combination of criteria. Methods included plan drawing analysis, staff questionnaires (n = 72), staff interviews (n = 9), and systematic observation (6 hours).RESULTS: In some patient rooms, access to daylight and/or outdoor views was excellent, while in other rooms such access was hindered by frosted glass or adjacent bushes or buildings. Single-bed rooms gave family members improved privacy and greater ability to stay in the patient room. Some patient room modules provided efficient patient observation and staff collaboration, but more noise and reduced patient privacy. Other modules provided a calm patient room environment, but caused some staff to feel isolated and have difficulty in getting assistance. CONCLUSIONS: The evaluation of the three projects reveals variation in whether design strategies successfully achieve their desired outcomes. Varying designs of the patient room module affect users in unique ways and must balance privacy, visibility, quietness, and staff access to assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stephen Ball’s work has deservedly received a good deal of attention. In this article, I detail a number of tasks in which the critical sociologist of education – as a ‘public intellectual’ – should engage. I then place Ball’s work within these tasks and evaluate his contributions to them. In the process, I show that one of the things that set Stephen Ball apart from many others is his insistence that both structural and poststructural theories and analyses are necessary for ‘bearing witness’ and for an adequate critical understanding of educational realities. I demonstrate how he creatively employs both sets of traditions. At the same time as I am very positive in my evaluation of his contributions, I suggest a number of issues that Ball and those who are rightly influenced by his work could productively deal with to go further into the complexities of the relationship between education and the politics of redistribution and recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I want to use this essay – basically a commentary – as a context for some political reflections on what is happening to the governance and the labour processes at universities internationally. In the process, in addition to my critical reflections on the neoliberal impulses affecting universities, I want to do two other things. First, I shall expand the range of work and workers that need to be considered if our analyses are to be true to the range and depth of these transformations. And second, I also want to complicate the usual critical analyses of what is happening in higher education by broadening the discussion to include movements that include but go beyond the class-based models that are often employed. Thus, in a later part of this essay, I urge us to pay closer attention to conservative religious movements and institutions that are having an increasing impact on the politics of knowledge at universities in a number of countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We live in a time when the very meaning of democracy is being radically changed. Democracy is indeed a contested concept; it is at the center of struggles over what the goals of education should be, how it should be done and this is not only about schools. It is about what kind of society we want and what kinds of politics will help us get there. We wonder: Can education change society? analyzing the role of schools inside economy, the crucial site for creating activist identities among oppressed people; the large part of their lives students spend inside schools where they come to grips with authority relations, to be with others who are both the same and diff erent; what is socially valued as “legitimate knowledge" and what is seen as merely “popular"; recognition over race/ ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and other important dynamics of power. An example to think about education policies and their role in social transformation can be found in the cityof Porto Alegre in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We live in a time when the very meaning of democracy is being radically changed. Democracy is indeed a contested concept; it is at the center of struggles over what the goals of education should be, how it should be done and this is not only about schools. It is about what kind of society we want and what kinds of politics will help us get there. We wonder: Can education change society? analyzing the role of schools inside economy, the crucial site for creating activist identities among oppressed people; the large part of their lives students spend inside schools where they come to grips with authority relations, to be with others who are both the same and different; what is socially valued as “legitimate knowledge" and what is seen as merely “popular"; recognition over race/ ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and other important dynamics of power. An example to think about education policies and their role in social transformation can be found in the city of Porto Alegre in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Someone Has to Fail, Labaree (2010) offers an admirably concise overview of the history and promise of education reform in the United States, combining insights from the history of education, policy studies, and a refreshingly accurate and nuanced account of what it is like to actually manage a classroom environment. While in this essay we shall raise some substantive questions about some of Labaree’s analysis, it is to his credit that we wish to take his work so seriously. Someone Has to Fail offers a reinterpretation of the complexities of education reform, one that is full of useful counterpoints to many of the most common claims made by today’s business-minded reformers. Thus, the work is well worth reading. However, we still wish that Labaree had more deeply explored the contexts within which his education “consumers” were making their system-shaping decisions. Such an effort would have offered a more compellingly critical assessment of the importance of curriculum and the struggles over knowledge and culture. It would have brought the experiences and movements of the marginalized closer to the center of its account. And in the process, it might have engendered a somewhat less gloomy perspective regarding the roles that schools might still play in efforts to create a more just society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental question lies at the heart of the issues surrounding the connections between educational projects and larger socially critical movements and projects. What would a socially just education system look like? In answering this, one place immediately comes to mind, a locale where this question was answered through real transformations: the municipal educational system of Porto Alegre, Brazil. This article examines the structural changes that were put in place in Porto Alegre’s municipal system during the 16-year tenure of the Popular Administration (a coalition of left-wing parties, led by the Workers Party that governed the city from 1989 to 2004) and offers a preliminary evaluation of the current state of the schools in Porto Alegre. Among the questions we address are: How did these changes come about? What were the components of the Porto Alegre experience? What did it achieve? What is its legacy? What has lasted? What does this tell us about the prospects for socially committed critical reforms? To answer these questions, we first situate Porto Alegre in its context. We then examine why Porto Alegre’s educational system deserves to be studied and what it achieved. We also present some challenges that the experience is currently facing and finally we revisit the Porto Alegre school system six years after the Workers Party left office and address both some of what has lasted and what has changed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the U.S. government released its 2007 census figures in January 2010, it reported that 12% of the U.S. population— more than 38 million people—were foreign born. First-generation people were now one out of every eight persons in the nation, with 80% coming from Latin America and Asia. This near-record transformation, one in which diasporic populations now constitute a large and growing percentage of communities throughout the nation and an ever-growing proportion of children in our schools, documents one of the most profound reasons that we must think globally about education. This transformation is actually something of which we should be proud. The United States and a number of other nations are engaged in a vast experiment that has rarely been attempted before. Can we build a nation and a culture from resources and people from all over the world? The impacts of these global population flows on education and on teacher education are visible all around us. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The documentary “Waiting for Superman” has become one of those rare things, a (supposed) documentary that generates a wider audience. It also is one of the more recent embodiments of what Nancy Fraser (1989) labels as the “politics of needs and needs discourses.” Dominant groups listen carefully to the language and issues that come from below. They then creatively appropriate the language and issues in such a way that very real problems expressed by multiple movements are reinterpreted through the use of powerful groups’ understandings of the social world and of how we are to solve “our” problems. This is exactly what is happening in education; and it is exactly what this film tries to accomplish. We critically examine the arguments and assumptions that the film makes, as well as how it makes them. In the process, we demonstrate how it elides crucial questions, contradicts many of its own claims, and acts to close off the kinds of substantive discussions that are essential for serious educational reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of discussing the significant contributions that Len Barton has made to the sociology of education and to disability studies, I argue that a good deal of critical analyses of power and inequality in education are impoverished by some of their essentialist and reductive tendencies. I use an example taken from disability rights to show how parts of these tendencies can be overcome. I suggest that disability rights movements provide powerful possibilities for the interruption of capitalist ideological forms and their attendant ways of organising and controlling labour. They do this by challenging some of the most fundamental assumptions that underpin capitalist economies and ways of life. By strongly resisting the ways in which paid work and paid workers are treated, new relations are made possible. I connect this example to some of the insightful analyses of the place of affective equality in the struggle for social justice in both a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition. Building on these arguments, I then argue for a broadened conception of critical research and critical action. I describe nine tasks in which the critical scholar/activists should engage if they are to be true to an enlarged conception of the 'public intellectual' and 'public sociologist'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses curriculum theory and curriculum language. It analyzes the theory presented in "Curricular Language and Classroom Meanings," a chapter by Dwayne Huebner from a book published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). The author emphasizes the importance for educators to avoid "self-confining schemas" of language, and explains five systems used in educational activity: technical, political, scientific, aesthetic, and ethical. He argues that these five fields should be explored in new ways to create new opportunities for educational growth.

This article traces part of the history of neoconservatism in the United States and analyses its impact on contemporary schooling. It examines the political evolution of a fraction of old leftists whose disenchantment with the possibilities of radical transformation led them to become new rightists. Whether attacking the countercultural left or the welfare state in the 1960s, or critical multiculturalism more recently, neoconservatives have embraced anti-utopianism as the only corrective for the assumed naivete of leftist cultural and economic desires. Concerns for the 'restoration' of cultural and national order are evident in reforms endorsed by this segment, including educational standards and a core curriculum that mediate against the progressive monopoly presumed to exist in schools. Rather than allowing more radical desires to be disciplined by such reforms, it is imperative to reclaim the freedom dreams embedded in past democratic movements and to learn from the grassroots efforts of communities working to create real utopias in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent debate over education reform, Japanese conservative politicians and intellectuals have selectively appropriated a particular crisis-and-success narrative of British education reform to de-territorialize contentious policy changes. They assert that Britain achieved successful education reform by transforming the very same teaching practices and legal framework that currently afflict Japanese education. In so doing, the Japanese conservatives have legitimized the fundamental 'reform' of post-war Japanese education through the combination of nationalistic and quasi-market interventions in education. Drawing on a wide range of literature (literature on educational borrowing, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies), this article illuminates how the Japanese conservatives have appropriated external references to 'British education reform' to reconstitute the people's common sense about the current state and the future course of Japanese education. In addition, we use this Japanese case study to advance the re-conceptualization of the politics of educational borrowing from the perspective of non-western 'others.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the continuing series of the Reviewing Policy section, this article examines some of the recent literature on the creation-evolution controversy. These controversies are placed within a larger analysis of the growth of authoritarian populist movements in the United States. The article then focuses attention on debates both over a number of arguments surrounding the ways in which intelligent design had been justified and surrounding some of the dangers of possible arrogance that have been associated with the history of the popularization of evolutionary perspectives. The author then offers some strategic suggestions for going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most educators in the United States have had to confront the changed reality brought about by the federal reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, commonly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This represents a set of initiatives that can radically transform the federal role in policing and controlling core aspects of education in general and teacher education. Using a number of key volumes that have been written to either criticize or support major components of NCLB, I provide a critical reading of the assumptions behind NCLB and point to a number of its key negative implications for educational policy and practice. In the process, I point to areas where educators might look for more critically democratic alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]