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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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. (Contains 6 notes.)

In the elections of 2006 and 2008, progressive and liberal groups in the United States broke through key bulwarks of the Right to capture some of the highest hills on the political landscape. Although progressives and liberals now control key positions, the Right still holds wide swaths of terrain and still exercises considerable power in shaping public opinion. This fact is not lost on Kevin Kumashiro, who examines the enduring influence of conservative thought in his important new book "The Seduction of Common Sense: How the Right Has Framed the Debate on America's Schools." In this article, the authors recap Kumashiro's analysis and highlight some of his most compelling proposals for bringing about progressive change in education. Next, they review his theory of common sense and framing and suggest ways to build out from this conception. They conclude the article by thinking through how progressives might reframe education debates in accordance with principles of social justice. Since "The Seduction of Common Sense" raises a number of theoretical and political issues, their article will need to engage with, build on, and also at times go beyond what they believe are some of the limitations of Kumashiro's otherwise very thoughtful book.

This article examines the ways in which the complex and at times contradictory project of "conservative modernization" has altered the terrain of education. It extends the arguments I make in "Educating the "Right" Way" (2006) about understanding the "right", about the possibilities of interrupting the right in education, and about our roles in assisting in the building of workable alternatives. It proposes a number of tasks of the critical scholar/activist in education. The aim is to contribute to an ongoing set of crucial debates about the means and ends of our educational institutions, about their connections to larger institutions and power relations, and what our responses to these relations should be.

In a considerable number of nations, "conservative modernization" has gained increasing influence. Neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, and new middle-class managerialists have defined the terrain of educational policy and practice. In some nations as well, authoritarian populist religious conservative movements and ideologies have also become major actors in the struggles over what the ends and means of education are. I critically examine the contradictory alliance that has been built among these movements and ideologies. However, understanding the reasons behind the growing influence of these positions is not sufficient. I then discuss a number of strategies for interrupting their power, some of which may be risky but are worth being taken seriously if we are to engage in successful counter-hegemonic activity.

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.

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." (Contains 2 notes.)

This article combines discussions of the politics of education with personal story telling to remind us why the continuing struggle over schooling--over what is and is not taught, over how it is taught and evaluated, over how students with different characteristics are treated, over how teachers and other school employees are respectfully dealt with, over how the relationship between schools and their communities can be democratized, and so much more--is absolutely crucial to the pursuit of social justice. Using the example of the book "Democratic Schools", it suggests tactics for making critically democratic practices more visible. It also describes seven specific tasks that critical scholar/activists in education should perform if we are committed to challenging dominant relations in education and the larger society. (Contains 1 note.)

In this article I respond to the analyses of "Educating the 'Right' Way" and "The State and the Politics of Knowledge" that were given by Stephen Ball, Russell Fox and Antonio Novoa. I situate the development of the kinds of argument that these books make, in the larger corpus of my work and in the growth of neoliberal, neoconservative, authoritarian populist religious movements, and the new managerial emphases that have become so powerful internationally in education. I then discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the thoughtful points made by Ball, Fox and Novoa.

This article raises questions about current educational reform efforts now underway in a number of nations. Research from a number of countries is used to document some of the hidden differential effects of two connected strategies - neo-liberal inspired market proposals and neo-liberal, neo-conservative, and middle class managerial inspired regulatory proposals, including national curricula and national testing. This article describes how different interests with different educational and social visions compete for dominion in the social field of power surrounding educational policy and practice. In the process, it documents some of the complexities and imbalances in this field of power. These complexities and imbalances result in "thin" rather than "thick" morality and tend toward the reproduction of both dominant pedagogical and curricular forms and ideologies and the social privileges that accompany them.

Situates the experience of Porto Alegre in the larger political and educational context of Brazil; presents normative goals of the Citizen School and examines the mechanisms that helped forge these goals; describes and explains some elements of the institutional design of the Citizen School; evaluates potential problems of the project; offers some considerations about its future. (Contains 36 references.) (Authors/PKP)

Previous studies of the role of education in state-building have neglected the relative autonomy and non-neutral stance of the school system. Bernstein's notion of "pedagogic device" is used to illuminate conflicts and contradictions between educational development and state-building in the case of Singapore's efforts to control the curriculum of Chinese schools and thereby promote social integration of the Chinese minority. Contains references. (SV)

Examines how negotiating local control of schooling can be an effective force of resistance against the market-economy paradigm of education, describing the policies of the popular administration in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Focuses on the Citizen School, "which provides quality education to impoverished people." Also examines proposals that are explicitly designed to radically change both the municipal schools and the relationship between communities, the state, and education. (SM)

Neoliberalism claims that privatization, marketization, uniform standards, and accountability--some important dynamics surrounding globalization in education--increase choices and quality in education. However, numerous studies show that the market has consistently devalued alternatives; increased the power of dominant models; and exacerbated racial, gender, and class differences in access and outcome. Context-specific effects are emphasized. (Contains 60 references.) (TD)

Argues that the conscious originating motives for both market-oriented and uniform standards approaches to improving the quality of teacher education may not guarantee the effects of such policies in the real world of real schools, noting that such reforms may have dangerous consequences unless efforts are situated within an honest analysis of what is currently happening in education. (SM)

Analyzes the ways in which administrators, teachers, and students in two commercial high schools responded to the educational policies and work subjectivities that were articulated by the dominant faction in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and that resulted from the concern about the lack of manual workers in the country. (CMK)

Argues that the ultimate effect of many recent educational "reforms" will be to exacerbate existing inequalities. Examines how such inequalities are publicly justified by the use of moral and biological logic systems. Explores the use of these arguments, such as those crystallized in Herrnstein and Murray's "Bell Curve," to support conservative policies in education and the larger society. (23 references) (MLH)

Discusses the ideological and social grounding and effects of the NCTM's "Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics" and "Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics." Includes issues regarding the financial crisis in education, inequality in schools, the possibilities and limitations of a mathematics curriculum grounded in students' experiences, and the complicated realities of teachers' lives. (49 references) (Author/MDH)

Author argues that education has increasingly become dominated by economic interest that can lead not to enhancing equality but to its opposite. Important ideological shifts are occurring in what education is for and in the content and control of curriculum, with an increased emphasis on making education an economic product. Author predicts a major impact on science education. (Author/PR)

Criticizes the educational goals of the conservative reform movement of the 1980s. Addresses the implications of shifting curricular decision making from teachers to state legislators and local administrators. Examines some alternatives that give poorer students access to new technologies and a broader skills base and that contribute to community development. (CJS)

Describes examples drawn mostly from urban areas that required the building of coalitions between schools and communities to create a new, more democratic context for curriculum development. Cited are the nationwide Vocational Education Project, the Southern Coalition for Educational Equity, and the "Rethinking Schools" progressive newsletter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (eight references) (MLF)

Argues that the New Right has translated economic doctrine into the language of experience and moral imperative through populist politics. Maintains that curriculum decisions are involved in political and cultural conflict as depicted by the question: Whose knowledge becomes official knowledge? Urges curriculum workers to speak for the progressive education tradition. (SLM)

Responds to Romberg's reaction and argues that the present conservative social context will determine the use to which the "Standards" are put. Expresses concern that unequal school finance policies in providing technologically rich classroom environments will result in educational stratification. (MDH)

This article critiques "Schooling and Work in the Democratic State" by Martin Carnoy and Henry M. Levin. The book examined the public school as more than an institution that reproduces unequal class relations of capitalist society, but also as a product of conflict between the dominant and the dominated in the paid workplace. (MT)

When the problems to be solved are structural problems of society, it is argued, blaming teachers is simply shifting the focus. Also discussed are potential effects of the Holmes Group proposals on who enrolls in teacher education, who is hired by school systems, and what is the science of education. (MT)

Examines some disturbing tendencies in curriculum content and descion-making. Argues that a rigorous, neoconservative back-to-basics program, coupled with use of corporate school management models, is not the answer. Excessive standardization could increase the dropout rate and cause the deskilling of teachers. Societal influences need to be recognized and confronted. Includes eight references. (MLH)

School curricula are not politically neutral grounds of knowledge. Rather, each takes certain social forms and embodies certain interests. The article discusses how the power of class, race, and gender dynamics determines curriculum structure. It also discusses the role of the school in capitalist countries. (JL)

Offers an analysis of the various national reports on education issued between 1983 and 1986. Argues that as a group, the reports are as much political as they are educational documents. Contends that the recommendations of the reports are built upon a vision of the future economy that is wrong and that the educational solutions offered are inappropriate. (JDH)