Racial segregation has remained a lasting legacy of rural schools in southern states. Our article explains a case where community leaders created a diverse charter school to change its historical practice of an isolated White private school and isolated African American public schools. We scan documents and literature related to this integration…

Issues of transitional justice are central to countries moving away from identity-based conflict. Research tends to focus on the most well-known forms of transitional justice, like truth commissions. Far less attention has been given to education as a form of transitional justice, and even less to teacher professional development, even though…

In this article, Carol Ann Tomlinson reflects on "the next steps on the march toward equity?" It was not until her first teaching job that she had a real understanding of societal inequities in a very rural, very poor area of a southern state. In this context she began to develop an understanding of how society sends its young to school…

As a requirement for a federal neighborhood revitalization grant, the authors trained resident interviewers and coordinated the conduct of more than 1000 door-to-door interviews of a stratified random sample. The targeted area was a multiethnic, lower income neighborhood that continues to experience the effects of past segregation. Monitoring and…

Schools do not receive much recognition within urban sociological research for the role they perform in shaping the demographic, structural, and social features of neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan areas. In contrast, this article links schools, and the racial avoidance that operates through educational policy, to the extreme economic…

This article reconstructs the story behind "Freeman v. Pitts" (1992), one of the main US Supreme Court cases that made it easier for school districts to terminate court desegregation orders and that, in turn, helped to propel a widely documented trend: the resegregation of southern schools. The case in part hinged on the question of…

Misrecognition of South African university students is at the heart of this article. "Misrecognition" refers in this article to the exclusionary institutional discourses and practices of this country's universities, which continue to prevent the majority of their (Black) students' from achieving a successful education. It is a conceptual…

South Africa labours under a bimodal education system in which inequality is deeply entrenched. Approximately 83% of schools are classed as being "dysfunctional" and many learners are not effectively equipped for meaningful futures. Learners who are able to attend the few functional schools are generally able to attain better jobs and…

The University of Pretoria (UP) adopted an anchor institution strategy and designated the Mamelodi Campus as a faculty with a focus on community engagement with the primary goal of broadening educational pathways to post-secondary school attainment. As a conceptual shift from the community engagement literature, the Mamelodi Campus identifies the…

Lecturing can be positively regarded as a practice by which students can be treated with respect in educational processes which grant them freedom to pursue and acquire new knowledge that meets their needs. Lecturing can also be negatively conceived as a practice which others students and positions them as people who deserve to be chided and…

When the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was killed by a white Ferguson police officer in August, researcher Richard Rothstein put his other projects aside to investigate a question that many otherwise well-informed people were asking--Why did this St. Louis suburb so closely resemble the stereotype of an urban ghetto, with pervasive poverty…

South Africa is facing the challenge of creating a viable nation from a situation of interplay between diverse racial, ethnic and linguistic forces. This article discusses the implications for education of the evolving picture of language policy as South Africa addresses the task of nation-building. Language policy is important because of its key…

Organisational change processes are by nature complex and often highly contested. This is particularly true of the transformation South African institutions of higher education have been going through since the end of the apartheid era. Using a narrative approach, this article presents a multi-faceted range of stories by the University of the Free…

Identifying the challenges his students faced both with recall and analysis of the content they had learned for their GCSE course, Ed Durbin devised a solution which focused not on exam skills and revision lessons, but on using Key Stage 3 to build the 'hinterland' of contextual knowledge and causal analysis his students required to make sense of…

Some sixty years after the 1954 "Brown" decision declared separate schooling inherently unequal, America's student population is much larger and more demographically diverse. For many decades court mandated desegregation plans were implemented, but today public schools are again largely segregated by race, ethnicity, and family…