Dr. Byron McClenney is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Educational Administration and serves on the staff of the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas-Austin as Project Director for Achieving the Dream. He was previously the President of the Community College of Denver. As President of the Community College of…

The community college represents the only form of universal access to education, and is thus purported to be the gateway to low-income and minority students' realization of the "American Dream." That dream is growing more and more elusive for a substantial number of people. Instead of breaking down ethnic and class barriers to economic…

In his recent speech at a Harvard commencement ceremony, Bill Gates said that "reducing inequity is the highest human achievement." He recognizes that the problems of global health in this world, the challenges of alleviating poverty and despair, and the wide disparities in educational attainment require significant investment by those…

Over the last two decades in many countries, culturally responsive, multicultural and bilingual approaches to teaching have largely been replaced by standardised curricula and pedagogy, rooted in a political shift toward neoliberalism that has pushed business models of school reform. I argue that neoliberal reforms, by negating the central…

Recently this journal published a research article examining the effectiveness of three different tests in identifying ethnically diverse gifted and talented children (Lewis, DeCamp-Fritson, Ramage, McFarland, & Archwamety, 2007, Volume 15, Number 1, pp. 38-42). After examining the proportions of Caucasian and non-Caucasian children identified…

If the recent elections of a Black man to the presidency and a Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court of the United States, or news that Ku Klux Klan membership is down from its estimated high of 6 million in 1924 to about 8,000 in 2008 makes one think racism is gone from America, think again! Idaho residents still express concern about the image of…

As has been said by many educators, the challenge of educating the historically underserved--minority students, low-income students, and students who are the first in their families to attend college--must be met. Apart from the moral imperative, there is the need to raise the education and skill levels of all people to assure a reasonable…

In this response to Konstantinos Alexakos, Jayson K. Jones, and Victor H. Rodriguez's study, I discuss ways attending to student membership in groups can both inform research on equity and diversity in science education and improve the teaching of science to all students. My comments are organized into three sections: how underrepresented…

For centuries there have been strong tensions between Gypsy/Traveller communities and their nation states. Today, discrimination against Gypsies/Travellers in the UK is still so widespread that it has been described as the last "respectable" form of racism. The paper argues that the experiences of Gypsies/Travellers, as they come into…

The face of New England is changing. Immigrant populations, people from low-income families, and young people of color are now among the fastest-growing populations in New England. In addition, the foundation of the region's economic prosperity is expected to be intellectual. In this article, the authors discuss how New England's six land-grant…

In this article, the author, who is an unqualified community worker in London, discusses the books that have influenced her thinking and practice in community work. She discusses that publications such as "In and Against the State" (1979), and Cynthia Cockburn's work, "The Local State" (1977), offered a sustainable, dialectical…

Research clearly shows that, in spite of large-scale social and political changes, women still bear the primary responsibility for housework. Research explaining the unequal division of domestic labor produces mixed results. The authors argue that the "new city" structure of the modern suburbs may be partially responsible for the tenacity of the…

This commentary was written after the May Day of 2006, which hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrants in the United States used to protest against their predicament. As a largely "illegal," hence invisible and unrecognized minority, they find themselves in extremely vulnerable positions in the labour, housing, and political markets,…

The announcement in June 2007 by Antioch University that it would be closing Antioch College produced a great deal of commentary. One of the better offerings was a 2007 piece in the "Weekly Standard" by Charlotte Allen, which ran under the title "Death by Political Correctness." Her analysis presents a complex picture, but Allen leaves no doubt…

The Supreme Court has held repeatedly that race-based preferences in public university admissions are constitutional. But debates over the wisdom of affirmative action continue. Opponents of these policies argue that preferences are detrimental to minority students--that by placing these students in environments that are too competitive,…