Since the mid-1970s the U.S. imprisonment rate has increased roughly fivefold. As Christopher Wildeman and Bruce Western explain, the effects of this sea change in the imprisonment rate--commonly called mass imprisonment or the prison boom--have been concentrated among those most likely to form fragile families: poor and minority men with little…

Buchmann, Condron and Roscigno argue in their article, "Shadow Education, American Style: Test Preparation, the SAT and College Enrollment," that the activities in which students engage to prepare for college entrance exams are forms of shadow education, a means by which more advantaged parents seek to pass their privileged status along…

Few of today's teachers can remember an economic situation quite like the one everyone now faces. To find analogies for the collapse of the housing bubble and the subsequent credit crisis, one has to search not his or her memories but the textbooks. "The Great Gatsby" and "The Grapes of Wrath" suddenly make more sense now. Generations of students…

In this paper, I offer my own counterstory of matriculating through a teacher education program as an African American student on a predominately White campus as a reference point for thinking through how racism operates through teacher education's dominant discourse and practice of teacher reflection. It is an important story to tell primarily…

The study of whiteness in education is receiving increased attention. This essay argues that the No Child Left Behind Act is an example of color-blindness "par excellence." NCLB's hidden referent of whiteness makes a casual pass at racial explanation that sidesteps race as a causal explanation for educational disparities. In this sense,…

The "achievement gap" is one of the most disturbing phenomena in American education. Teachers want to close the gap in their own schools--but because the gap is rooted in longstanding and widespread problems, the task sometimes feels like a monumental undertaking. This fall, Teaching Tolerance launched the Teaching Diverse Students Initiative…

This article argues three things. First, it argues that the perception of diversity being problematic in Europe has been generated largely by non-European immigration into urban areas. This has been Britain's experience for 50 years and Spain's for barely 15, but whether the immigrants are ex-colonial, Turkish or Balkan migrant labour, or Africans…

A perennial talking point of politicians and scientists, since the time of the Greeks, is to lament how American youth are sliding into moral decrepitude, lawlessness, and poor mental health. Indeed, to hear some observers talk, particularly in this election year, young people in the United States are being battered by a coarsened culture that…

Over the past 40 years the fraction of mixed race black-white births has increased nearly nine-fold. There is little empirical evidence on how these children fare relative to their single-race counterparts. This paper describes basic facts about the plight of mixed race individuals during their adolescence and early adulthood. As one might expect,…

Child welfare is not the only system in which disparities have been identified in U.S. foster care. According to the recent Children's Defense Fund's report "America's Cradle to Prison Pipeline," racial and economic disparities exist in many systems including child welfare, health care, mental health, education, and juvenile and criminal justice.…

This article discusses my interactions with the teacher in whose classroom I conducted my doctoral research. That project was concerned with using transformative Drama pedagogy to reconceptualise cultural identity in multicultural curricular policy. The participants in my study comprised of 15 Grade Nine Drama students and their teacher at "May…

Although hip hop culture has been one of the most significant urban youth movements over the last three decades, it has only recently gained attention within the educational literature as a force to be reckoned with. And even then, much of the literature seeks to understand how hip hop can be used to engage students in the official school…

The paradox of the nation's teacher preparation programs is that "everything" is about diversity and social justice in the preparation of teachers and, simultaneously, "nothing" is about diversity and social justice in the preparation of teachers. Across teacher education, there is wide consensus that preparing current and prospective teachers to…

This book traces the long legal history of first racial segregation, and then racial desegregation in America. The authors explain how rapidly changing demographics and family structure in the United States have greatly complicated the project of top-down government efforts to achieve an "ideal" racial balance in schools. It describes…

We argue that the report by Templer and Arikawa contains misleading conclusions and is based upon faulty collection and analysis of data. The report fails to hold up for quality of data, statistical analysis, and the logic of science.