Search

I have had a close and long-standing relationship with the IOE (Institute of Education), UCL's Faculty of Education and Society (University College London, UK). In order to understand why and how for many years the IOE became my 'second home', I infuse this article with a combination of critical academic and political points and a detailed sense of personal history. In the process, I trace out the development of a number of my arguments about the relationship between knowledge, power and education. I connect this to the role of the IOE in this development, both as an institution and with regard to people with whom I had close contacts over the years. Among the people I particularly focus on is Geoff Whitty, who was a key figure in all of this.

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.

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.

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.

In education, the areas of critical policy studies, critical cultural studies, and critical curriculum studies all owe a good deal to a number of people. Among them are Paulo Freire, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, and Antonio Gramsci. Yet no such listing would be complete without the inclusion of Stuart Hall. The two books I discuss in this essay provide us with important parts of the reasons many people continue to find in his work--and his life--the kinds of analyses and commitments that point their own work in more substantive, nuanced, and satisfying directions. In many ways, his writings and his life provide a model for what I have called the critical scholar/activist in education. [An Essay Review of Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History." Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. pp. 218. Paper. ISBN 9780822362630 and Stuart Hall, with Bill Schwarz, "Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands." Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. pp. 302. Hardcover. ISBN 9780822363873.]

This article examines a new trend of high school choice in China – parental choice of emerging international high-school curriculum programs (IHSCPs) recently established by Chinese elite public high schools. We add to the existing critical literature on school choice by providing a detailed empirical analysis of why, how, and under what conditions Chinese parents with high socio-economic status choose a particular IHSCP. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's conceptual triad of practice – capital, habitus, and field, the article points out that Chinese upper-middle- and upper-class parents engage in complicated conversion strategies surrounding their individual and collective struggles for elite education in both national and international fields of power. The study foregrounds the role of neoliberalism in articulating local and global education markets that allows privileged Chinese to transcend structural constraints in China and seek out opportunities in the international education field for their children. [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]

The special issue documents the conceptual, empirical, and political progress that critical policy analysis in education has made. The contributions build on and employ the tools that have already been established, while they represent new critical approaches and combinations, each of which provides paths to be developed even further. I discuss the gains, limits, and paths to take to strengthen these analyses. [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.

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.

In this article, the author examines the ways in which the claim to subaltern status has led to a partial withdrawal from state-run institutions and to a practice of schooling that is meant to equip the children of authoritarian populist parents both with an armor to defend what these groups believe is their threatened culture and with a set of skills and values that will change the world so that it reflects the conservative religious commitments that are so central to their lives. He focuses on the ways in which new technologies such as the Internet have become essential resources--in essence "the" model of teacher education--in what authoritarian populists see as a counter-hegemonic struggle against secular humanism and a world that no longer "listens to God's word" (Apple, 2006). He argues that only by placing these technologies back into the social and ideological context of their use by specific communities (and by specific people within these communities) can people understand the meaning and function of new technologies in society and in education. In order to accomplish this, the author also focuses on the labor of home schooling, on how it is organized, on new definitions of legitimate knowledge and legitimate teaching, and on how all this has been partly transformed by the ways in which technological markets are being created. Much of the author's discussion centers around the place of gender in social movements, since conservative women have multiple identities within them, simultaneously able to claim subaltern status based on the history of dominant gender regimes, and having dominant status given their positioning in relationship to other oppressed groups. (Contains 7 notes.)

This article examines the possibility, and reality, of counter-hegemonic policies and practices. These policies and practices call forth a very different vision of the place of the school in society and of curricula, teaching, and evaluation. They also present a serious challenge to teacher education, since they require the education of a "new" kind of teacher, someone who is deeply committed to a process of social transformation and to working cooperatively with oppressed groups in ways that develop very different skills than the ones now advocated in the reform proposals of conservative modernization. In this article, the authors describe and analyze the policies of the "Popular Administration" in Porto Alegre. The proposals for the formation of a Citizen School are explicitly designed to radically change both the municipal schools and the relationship between communities, the state, and education. This set of policies and the accompanying processes of implementation are constitutive parts of a clear and explicit project aimed at constructing not only a better school for the excluded, but also a larger project of radical democracy. In order to understand the limits and possibilities of such attempts during a time of "conservative modernization," the authors need to closely examine a number of things: (1) how the proposal for the Citizen School connects to the larger project of the Popular Administration; (2) the major normative goals and institutional design created by this ongoing project; and (3) the possibilities and problems in generating the new realities the Workers Party committed itself to create. The authors briefly situate the experience of Porto Alegre in the larger political and educational context of Brazil. Then, they present the normative goals of the Citizen School and examine the mechanisms that helped to forge these goals. Thirdly, they describe and explain a number of crucial elements of the institutional design of the Citizen School. After that, they examine the consistency between the normative goals and the institutional design constructed to implement those goals and evaluate potential problems of the project. Finally, they offer some considerations about the future of the project and its potential contribution for the enhancement of democratic relationships inside and outside of education and suggest some implications for a more socially conscious model of teacher education.

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 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."

In "Can Education Change Society?" (Apple, 2013), Apple described a number of tasks in which the critical scholar/activist needs to engage. Among them are telling the truth about what is happening in the creation of inequalities, illuminating spaces of possibility, and acting as the critical secretary of the movements and people who actively try to alter these inequalities. Apple asserts that this 2017 "Politics of Education Yearbook," with its focus on the power of policymaking networks to set agenda and shape education policy with a series of case studies illustrates the complexity of modern policy arenas, and clearly indicates the power and reach of neoliberal agendas in an entire array of levels and sites. The range of issues that the respective authors focused upon in this yearbook is impressive; the papers addressed such matters as school choice, the politics of teacher unions, social networks, media, policy narratives, and charter schools. Apple states that no set of articles can do complete justice to a topic such as this, but he uses this commentary to response to issues that could add to the respective authors' discussion. [For "Can Education Change Society? Du Bois, Woodson and the Politics of Social Transformation," see EJ1035021.]

"The Journal of Educational Administration and History" has played an important role as a site for analyses that seek to expand both the academic and the ethical/political concerns of the field. A key word here is field. What counts as the field? What are its boundaries? Who is inside and who is outside? How has that changed over time? These are not simply "definitional" issues. They get to the core of what actually counts as debates (and debaters) in and over leadership. In this commentary, Michael Apple writes that answers to these question are also essential to uncovering the assumptive foundations that stand behind discussions like those represented in three papers contained within this issue of "Journal of Educational Administration and History" and adds his own views and concerns to the dialogue. The papers presented are: (1) "A new world order? Finding a local place for educational leadership" (Ira Bogotch); (2) "A social epistemology for educational administration and leadership" (Scott Eacott); and (3)" A little more madness in out methods: A snapshot of how the educational leadership, management and administration field conducts research" (Pat Thompson).

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.

This is a very difficult time in education. Neoliberal and neoconservative policies have had major effects on schools, on communities, on administrators, on teachers, and on all school staff. A new alliance has integrated education into a wider set of ideological commitments. The objectives in education are the same as those that guide economic and social welfare goals. They include the dramatic expansion of that eloquent fiction, the free market; the drastic reduction of government responsibility for social needs; the reinforcement of intensely competitive structures of mobility both inside and outside the school; the lowering of people's expectations for economic security; the "disciplining" of culture and the body; and the popularization of what is clearly a form of Social Darwinist thinking. In response to this, I detail nine tasks in which the critical scholar/activist should engage in fulfilling the role of the public intellectual. Such tasks are crucial if we are to collectively deal with the current crisis.

This article examines national conservative political advocacy groups' growing interest in local politics, and analyzes how they form alliances and gain political power. Following efforts to restrict collective bargaining for Wisconsin public employees, Kenosha school board members' attempts to legally protect teachers' rights provoked concern from nationally financed conservative groups. This article discusses why a small-town school board election attracted such attention, and the significance of increased attention to the local by these national groups.

It has become increasingly clear that education is a site of conflict. This essay examines the ideological positions that now dominate educational reforms and suggests a number of roles that critically democratic educators should play in confronting these reforms. It then details the contributions that the authors included in this special issue make toward understanding both the limits of current reforms and the possibilities of interrupting them.

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.

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 as "Official Knowledge" (2014) and "Educating 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What roles can and should teachers' unions play in the deliberations, debates, and conflicts over school reform in a time when education sits at the center of so much of our economic, political, ideological, and cultural tensions? Lois Weiner's new book, "The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice," speaks directly to this question. While supportive of unions and their historical and current contributions, Weiner is quite critical of the ways teachers' unions as organizations function and of many of the dominant political and educational positions that teachers' unions have taken. Weiner articulates an alternative, "social movement unionism." While not as fully developed as it might be, her position is thoughtful and provocative when grounded in the lost history of the very beginnings of teacher unionism in the United States and also in current examples of more socially involved efforts of union members here and elsewhere.

Most nations--and nations to be--have a history of people asking critical questions about schooling and about the politics of knowledge in which it participates. Is it simply reproducing the ideological goals and cultural forms and content of dominant groups? Could schooling be used to raise serious issues about existing societies? Could it go even further and be reorganized so that it actively participated in the reconstruction of those societies? Some of the most powerful traditions of asking and answering these questions--and of acting on them--can be found within oppressed communities themselves. Within these communities, among the most articulate and powerful traditions are those that evolved within African American collective efforts to create an education that responded to the short and long-term needs of black people. These traditions expressly aimed at changing the social realities that created these needs in the first place. I discuss two of the most insightful and committed scholar/activists of these movements: W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. In the process, however, I also extend my discussion beyond these two figures to also highlight the contributions of women and men practitioners and activists in grounding these critical traditions in the logics and activities of daily life in educational institutions.

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.

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.

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. (Contains 2 notes.)

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.

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.