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The purpose of this study is to examine the school selection process of parents whose children attended an urban school district in Northern California. Like numerous urban school districts across the United States, the district highlighted in this study also encountered students exiting its schools for the past decade. The findings shared in this paper from a mixed methods case study of parents whose children attend school in the district. Data were based on a quantitative survey and qualitative focus groups. The data indicate parents consider several key factors when selecting schools for their children including academics, class size, and differentiated instruction and support for their children; the school and administration's relationship to diversity and the community; and the overall enrollment process. The parents' narratives also revealed educational leaders must create a culturally relevant learning community in order to ensure parents, students, and community stakeholders will garner the support, resources, curricula, and learning activities to stop the exodus of children from schools within the school district.

Through a case study of two doctoral programs situated in the United States, this essay highlights how doctoral programs designed to prepare leaders in K-16 institutions and other contexts can be "framed around questions of equity, ethics, and social justice to bring about solutions to complex problems of practice" (CPED, 2016; Buss, Zambo, Zambo, Perry, & Williams, 2017; Zambo, Buss & Zambo; 2015). More specifically, we argue that programs should be able to clearly and explicitly articulate their distinctive understanding of "social justice" and trace the ways that this understanding is operationalized in particular facets of their program. In the following sections, we first offer a brief overview of our educational contexts, our programmatic definitions of social justice, and the ways we put that definition to work in our courses. Importantly, we offer the following as work-in-progress examples to serve as entry points into a larger conversation about operationalizing specific understandings of social justice in education doctorate programs, rather than as exemplars or models.

Twelve leading Social Foundations of Education (SFE) scholars describe their professional work in the field. The research question within this oral history study is: In what ways do SFE scholars express the importance of the Liberal Arts (LA) framework for the community of educational stakeholders in a democracy? The respondents explain the degree to which democratic teaching and learning--building voice, perspective, and point-of-view of the individual within community--supports growth in society and prepares classroom teachers to do such work. Moreover, they identify SFE as a significant field that leverages the LA framework of critique and deep thinking in teacher preparation coursework. The respondents note the importance of a strong relationship between SFE and Schools of Education (SOEs) methods faculty. They describe how SFE, with LA, advances democratic practices, essential to the work of SOE methods faculty, teachers of PreK-20+ classrooms, and the communities they serve.

The contributors to this special issue of "The Journal of Inquiry and Action" provide insight into why the Obama administration's educational policies manifest the dominance of neoliberal ideology over most elements of social life. The articles presented in this issue build on the work originally presented in "The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education: Can Hope Audaciously Trump Neoliberalism?" (Carr and Porfilio 2011). Given the dearth of critical analysis in relation to Obama's leadership and his administration's educational agenda, which the authors contend is fundamental to meaningful democratic development, this article examines the meaning of potential transformation in and through the Obama administration's approach to education. This analysis illuminates the disconnection between his rhetoric, especially during the two-year electoral campaign, and his policies.

This essay documents a few key examples of the critical pedagogy and curriculum that the authors employ to challenge pre-service and in-service teachers to consider the concrete and theoretical contexts of taking on a social-activist-teacher persona. Their vision of social justice is rooted firmly in the critical tradition, as it is anchored in excavating unjust social and economic formations that imperil the vast majority of the world's population, while concomitantly empowering the economic elite. Not only do they believe that teacher educators must take the lead in helping their students recognize the social, political, and economic forces creating injustice in schools and in the wider society, but they must help current and future teachers develop emancipatory visions of how to develop instructional designs, collaborate with educators, and engage in activist initiatives which have the potential to eliminate social inequalities and build institutional structures based on democracy, equity, and fairness. Like many teacher educators, the authors have worked in institutions where almost 95% of the teacher education students have self-identified as "White." Because of the difficulties of working with this nearly ubiquitous at-risk group (at risk for acting as oppressors), the authors focus their attention in this essay on the challenges White in-service and preservice teachers pose to practicing critical pedagogy. (Contains 3 notes.)

The purpose of this essay is to ameliorate the virulent discursive and material attack against today's "border" youth launched by large-scale corporations and Western politicians. Specifically, the authors problematize the dominant tropes of youth being mindless, obedient objects who passively accept the stark social reality they experience due to corporate logics trumping the needs and welfare of global citizens. Based on their empirical and cultural work with Hip Hop artists in the US and Canada, and through relevant examples in other global contexts, the authors illustrate that numerous Hip Hop artists are critically aware of the forces causing oppression in their social worlds and are actively employing various forms of social media for personal empowerment and social justice ends. Finally, the authors generate a conceptual model--Hip Hop Activist Praxis-- for the purpose of not only articulating the processes utilized by Hip Hop youth, artists and activists, but also aiding concerned scholars, educators and practitioners in challenging their views of youth, Hip Hop culture and technology, and (re) conceptualizing their partnerships with youth.

This essay details the pedagogical and cultural work of two youth-led organizations situated in Canada--Beat Nation and 411 Initiative for Change. Through the narratives generated by interviews with several of the organizations' artists and founders, the organizations' pedagogical work generated in cyberspace, and through artists' music, multi-media presentations, and speaking engagements in schools across Canada, we build on the critical project of reconceptualizing how youth express their awareness of what gives rise to salient social issues, such as racism, violence, environmental degradation, poverty, and gender inequalities, and how they work actively with other citizens to extend social and political rights for all. Youth-led organizations such as 411 for Change and Beat Nation seek to change the discursive realities and possibilities of hip hop by exercising it as a means of critical pedagogy. This approach supports the educational goals related to active citizenship, including solidarity, valuing the identities of minoritized populations, and a sense of belonging. We argue the organizations promote active citizenship by working to eliminate oppression confronting the global community, by guiding youth to understand the reasons for social inequality as well as the importance of working collectively to challenge injustice, and by embracing pro-social values and dispositions consistent with democracy, fairness, and equity. (Contains 1 footnote.)

Based upon the life histories of six Indigenous hip hop artists of the Beat Nation artist collective, this essay captures how Indigenous hip hop has the potential to revolutionize environmental education. Hip hop provides Indigenous youth an emancipatory space to raise their opposition to neocolonial controls of Indigenous territories that denigrate traditional ways of life, and to gather strength by engaging in the decolonizing processes of reclaiming their land, culture, language, and identity. Hip hop also helps youth recognize authentic dialogic education; build knowledge of Indigenous culture, language, and history; and develop strategies to change oppressive forces into resilient personal practices that transform Indigenous communities. This study is motivated by a commitment to showcase how alternative youth culture has the potential to resist neoliberal policies fueling neocolonialism and environmental devastation in Canada. (Contains 2 notes.)

This paper meshes Carr's research on media literacy with Porfilio's research on computer literacy, with both of these areas being focused on the central notion of social justice within a multicultural society. Both researchers teach pre-service teachers, and have an interest in extending multicultural education, which often equates, overlaps with, and complements intercultural education. The key issue probed throughout this paper relates to the potential for (critical) multicultural education to take place in and through attempts to inculcate a media and computer literacy that surpasses simplistic notions of tolerance, respect and basic knowledge of the "Other". The research underscores the need for formal and informal approaches to inculcating media and computing literacy in the classroom, which, ultimately, support a more robust critical multiculturalism in schools.

The purpose of this paper is to unveil how Peter McLaren's revolutionary brand of pedagogy, multiculturalism, and research colored my two-year qualitative research study, which unearthed twenty White female future teachers' experiences and perceptions in relationship to computing technology and male-centered computing culture. His ideas positioned me to see beyond technocentric discourses generated by political, economic, and education leaders, as I was enabled to pinpoint how larger social relations of power perpetuate computing technology as a "boy's toy," designed to amass wealth and power for elite White male corporate leaders at the expense of the vast majority of global citizens. His scholarship also proved to be a source courage and inspiration. It prodded me to believe my research project has the potency to bludgeon unjust practices that perpetuate women's and girls' technological reticence, fuel the corporate takeover of teacher education, and perpetuate Western imperialism, environmental degradation, and hopelessness across the globe. Not coincidently, the critical study served as an educative space for several pre-service teachers. They uncovered how several constitutive forces merge with unjust practices to create women's and girls' computing reticence as well as perpetuate women's marginalization in schools, the business world, and in other social contexts. They appear to possess the critical mindset and courage to create classroom practices bent on forging an egalitarian society.

This autoethnographic essay captures fifteen-years of struggles and ephemeral victories associated with developing and sustaining a critical educational leadership doctoral program within a conservative college of education located in the Midwestern United States. Despite having to grapple with non-critical faculty members and neoliberal forces designed to increase enrollment and gut the transformative focus of our program, we were able to keep the program vibrant for over 12 years. To our surprise, the dismantling of the doctoral program began to unfold when one of the core members of the program, a self-professed radical scholar, became a neoliberal administrator obedient to the interests of a new administrative team. The essay provides critical fodder for thinking about the limits and possibilities of sustaining critical educational initiatives amid a sociopolitical context designed to commercialize knowledge, to depoliticize radical intellectuals, and to divide faculty in the struggle to build an egalitarian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explains case story analysis as it applies to academic mobbing or collective bullying in the academe. Topics covered experiences of academic mobbing, the limitations of simply denouncing academic mobbing and the potential use of case story analysis as a means of reculturing with the goal of creating educational institutions that adhere and promote social justice.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including how recruitment program benefits the corporate elite, the impact of neoliberal agenda to the teaching profession, and how transnational organizations dominate the education systems.

It has been over eighteen months since Barack Obama defeated John McCain in the US presidential election. Sincethis period of time, the Obama administration has implemented, proposed, and supported a spate of educational reform measures, including increasing the length of the school year, tying school funding to K-12 students' performance on high-stakes examinations, firing teachers, gutting teacher unions and closing schools, opening charter schools, and tying teachers' evaluations to students' performance on standardized examinations. Despite the Obama administration's active involvement in shaping educational circles, there has been a dearth of critical analysis in relation to Obama's leadership and his educational agenda. In this essay, we illustrate how the Obama administration's educational vision is a manifestation of the dominance of neoliberal ideology over most elements of social life for the past 30 years. We believe our critical analysis of US political leaders' and their constituents' support of the corporate takeover of US schools gives those interested in education the power to strive for democratic and transformative experiences for all students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]