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Full-Text Articles in Education
Race To The Top: An Example Of Belief-Dependent Reality. A Response To "Race To The Top Leaves Children And Future Citizens Behind", William J. Mathis
Race To The Top: An Example Of Belief-Dependent Reality. A Response To "Race To The Top Leaves Children And Future Citizens Behind", William J. Mathis
Democracy and Education
Although the federal government claims otherwise, Race to the Top is not research based. Rather, its foundation is in ideology and belief-based realism. The overall effort is fundamentally antiscientific and distracts valuable and needed attention, resources, and focus from the nation's real problems of social, economic, and educational deprivation.
Creating Communities: Working With Refugee Students In Classrooms, Kevin C. Roxas
Creating Communities: Working With Refugee Students In Classrooms, Kevin C. Roxas
Democracy and Education
This article critically examines the reality of building community in public schools and specifically identifies the obstacles faced by teachers who try to create community with refugee students. The research in the article focuses on Ms. Patricia Engler, a teacher in a newcomer center for refugee students located in an urban setting. Engler created and fostered a sense of community for middle-school students in her classroom who often felt disconnected to their fellow students, their school, and the neighborhoods in which they lived, and was able to focus on work that she intuitively felt was right for her students based …
The Potential For Deliberative Democratic Civic Education, Jarrod S. Hanson, Ken Howe
The Potential For Deliberative Democratic Civic Education, Jarrod S. Hanson, Ken Howe
Democracy and Education
The values of aggregative democracy have dominated much of civic education as its values reflect the realities of the American political system. We argue that deliberative democratic theory better addresses the moral and epistemological demands of democracy when compared to aggregative democracy. It better attends to protecting citizens’ autonomy to participate in civic life and is able to accommodate the diverse experiences and viewpoints of the American public. We conclude by examining how deliberative democracy provides a new lens on civic education practices. It calls for attention to be given to the process of the exchange of reasons among students …
Imagining No Child Left Behind Freed From Neoliberal Hijackers, Eugene Matusov
Imagining No Child Left Behind Freed From Neoliberal Hijackers, Eugene Matusov
Democracy and Education
As a sociocultural educator and scholar, I have always been ambivalent about No Child Left Behind's slogan. I like its democratic ideal of “education without failure,” but I do not like the current educational policies guided by a neoliberal ideology. This article begins a discussion about what a No Student Left Behind educational practice might look like from a sociocultural democratic education perspective.
Race To The Top Leaves Children And Future Citizens Behind: The Devastating Effects Of Centralization, Standardization, And High Stakes Accountability, Joe Onosko
Democracy and Education
President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top (RTT) is a profoundly flawed educational reform plan that increases standardization, centralization, and test-based accountability in our nation’s schools. Following a brief summary of the interest groups supporting the plan, who is currently participating in this race, why so many states voluntarily submitted proposals, and what features of the plan that are most problematic, eight arguments are offered as to why RTT is highly detrimental to our nation.
The Courage To Critique Policies And Practices From Within: Youth Participatory Action Research As Critical Policy Analysis. A Response To “Buscando La Libertad: Latino Youths In Search Of Freedom In School”, Anjale Welton
Democracy and Education
This response to “Buscando la Libertad: Latino Youths in Search of Freedom in School” by Jason G. Irizarry demonstrates how youth participatory action research (YPAR) as an instrument of subverting oppressive school policies and structures is a form of critical policy analysis (CPA). As an evolving method, CPA acknowledges the absent voices in policy, questions policy inequities, fosters empowerment, and influences policy. Youths who engage in YPAR, as demonstrated by Project FUERTE, have the courage to critique school policies that have the power to alter their educational trajectories, which offers more hope for change than scholarly elites who critique policies …
Confronting Power: Success Isn’T Everything—But It’S Not Nothing Either. A Response To “Beyond The Catch-22 Of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward A More Pragmatic Approach For Dealing With Power”, Joel Westheimer
Democracy and Education
Fehrman and Schutz contend that the fine balance between having students experience real-world obstacles to social change and having them learn how to navigate around those obstacles can be achieved by having adults both pre-select community action projects that are both possible and meaningful to ensure a modicum of success, and jump in and redirect wayward efforts when necessary to get them back on a trajectory aimed at a positive outcome. I agree. I also suggest that other factors are significant as well, namely the purposeful nurturing of a sense of community and hopefulness. Finally, I point out that adult …
Students Have Their Own Minds. A Response To “Beyond The Catch-22 Of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward A More Pragmatic Approach For Dealing With Power”, Matthew Goldwasser
Students Have Their Own Minds. A Response To “Beyond The Catch-22 Of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward A More Pragmatic Approach For Dealing With Power”, Matthew Goldwasser
Democracy and Education
In response to the authors’ work on finding a more pragmatic approach to dealing with power, this commentary calls into question the possibility of a preestablished agenda by the researchers, who struggled to engage high school students. There might have been a case of overly ambitious expectations at work; also, the authors confess to being in the school only once a week and that their students were themselves struggling to find their place in a new charter school with an emphasis on social action. This response challenges the authors to reexamine their wish to engage students with institutional power by …
Class, Race, And The Discourse Of “College For All.” A Response To “Schooling For Democracy”, Ronald David Glass, Kysa Nygreen
Class, Race, And The Discourse Of “College For All.” A Response To “Schooling For Democracy”, Ronald David Glass, Kysa Nygreen
Democracy and Education
We critique the “college for all” discourse by unveiling its relationship to the politics of education, the broader economic and political contexts, and the class and race structures embedded in society and schooling, including higher education. We analyze the current and future labor markets to demonstrate the ways that the “college for all” discourse overstates the need for math and science knowledge and skills within the workforce, and we analyze the debt burdens associated with college attendance and completion to demonstrate that the promised benefits of “college for all” are often illusory for low-income, racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students. …
Schooling For Democracy: A Common School And A Common University? A Response To “Schooling For Democracy”, Diane Reay
Schooling For Democracy: A Common School And A Common University? A Response To “Schooling For Democracy”, Diane Reay
Democracy and Education
This short paper is a response to Nel Noddings’s article on schooling for democracy. Whilst agreeing with the basic premises of Noddings’s argument, it questions the possibility of parity between academic and vocational tracks given the inequitable social and educational contexts the two types of learning would have to coexist within. Drawing on the educational philosophies of John Dewey and R. H. Tawney, I argue that both the United States and the United Kingdom need to create educational systems that reduce the social distance between people rather than, as the current systems do, exacerbate them. This is an issue of …
Democracy And Development: The Role Of Outside-Of-School Experiences In Preparing Young People To Be Active Citizens, Carrie L. Lobman
Democracy And Development: The Role Of Outside-Of-School Experiences In Preparing Young People To Be Active Citizens, Carrie L. Lobman
Democracy and Education
Public schools historically have been the primary institution responsible for preparing young people for participation in a democratic society. However, the almost exclusive focus by today’s schools on knowledge and skills hinders their ability to be environments that support overall development and to produce the kinds of flexible, creative, and critical citizens that are needed to continuously create and recreate democracy. This review of the literature reframes the topic of democracy and education so as to address the relationship between democracy and development specific to youth development. In so doing, it adds practices by and findings from outside-of-school youth development …
Buscando La Libertad: Latino Youths In Search Of Freedom In School, Jason Irizarry
Buscando La Libertad: Latino Youths In Search Of Freedom In School, Jason Irizarry
Democracy and Education
Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of Latino high school students engaged in youth participatory action research (YPAR), this article describes students’ quest for freedom in schools, locating their struggle within a larger effort to realize the democratic ideals of public schooling. Using Latino/a Critical Race Theory as a theoretical lens, the author demonstrates how popular discourse around the “achievement gap” often obscures the oppressive policies and practices implemented by educators that limit freedoms necessary for educational and personal development and profoundly influence the identities and life trajectories of Latino youth. The article concludes with an exploration of YPAR as …
Beyond The Catch-22 Of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward A More Pragmatic Approach For Dealing With Power, Darwyn Fehrman, Aaron Schutz
Beyond The Catch-22 Of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward A More Pragmatic Approach For Dealing With Power, Darwyn Fehrman, Aaron Schutz
Democracy and Education
This study examines a two-year effort to engage groups of inner-city students in community engagement projects at Social Action Charter High School, SACHS, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In this project, graduate student volunteers coached small groups of students working on community change projects, collecting data on what happened over time. Kahne and Westheimer (2006) identified a key challenge to projects of this kind. On the one hand, social action projects seem able to enhance students’ belief in their own capacity to solve community problems only if adult allies make sure the students do not encounter any significant barriers to success, although …
Meaningful Hope For Teachers In Times Of High Anxiety And Low Morale, Carrie Nolan, Sarah Marie Stitzlein
Meaningful Hope For Teachers In Times Of High Anxiety And Low Morale, Carrie Nolan, Sarah Marie Stitzlein
Democracy and Education
Many teachers struggle to maintain or build hope among themselves and their students in today’s climate of high anxiety and low morale. This article describes and responds to those challenging conditions. It offers teachers and scholars of education a philosophically sophisticated and feasible understanding of hope. This notion of hope is grounded in pragmatism and grows out of the pragmatist commitment to meliorism. Hope is described as a way of living tied to specific contexts that brings together reflection and intelligent action alongside imagination and gratitude. Such hope is realistic and generative, rendering it well suited for teachers struggling in …
Schooling For Democracy, Nel Noddings
Schooling For Democracy, Nel Noddings
Democracy and Education
There is a widespread movement today to prepare all students for college, and it is promoted in the name of democracy. I argue here that such a move actually puts our democracy at risk by forcing students into programs that do not interest them and depriving them of courses at which they might succeed. We risk losing the vision of democracy that respects every form of honest work and cultivates a deep appreciation of interdependence.