Today, almost a century after gaining access to the country's most prestigious secondary schools, determining the academic achievement of African Trinidadian students remains a challenge as neither Trinidad and Tobago's Ministry of Education nor the Caribbean Examination Council, the regional agency responsible for administering standardized…

Diversity today is considered central to the capacity of postsecondary institutions to thrive in an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic society. However, as universities take steps to reap the educational benefits of racial and ethnic diversity, legal decisions and state laws increasingly restrict the tools these institutions have…

In this article, readers are asked to suspend conventional notions of affirmative action as a policy that ensures equitable admissions practices to the nation's most elite post secondary institutions, and instead to consider how affirmative action might be understood as a way to challenge the relations of power that govern the legitimation of…

The college access debate in America remains an important one. Affirmative action policies and practices continue to occupy a significant sub-component of the overall college access discussion. Recent legal debates and policy changes pertaining to affirmative action have encouraged analysis surrounding the overall viability and fairness of these…

The argument that cultural and other forms of diversity enhance the educational experience of all students is generally associated with post-1960 efforts to expand the presence of disadvantaged groups on the campuses of America's universities and colleges. Yet, in the case of UC Berkeley, arguments on the merits of cultural diversity have much…

In this article, I argue (1) affirmative action diverts attention from more urgent needs of racial justice in education--better quality K-12 education, and better quality and more accessible public higher education; (2) the increasing wealth of students at affirmative action institutions is a sign of diminished quality of those students compared…

Immediately after President Obama's successful campaign, many hypothesized that the United States had entered a post-racial era. This study uses critical race theory to examine how high-achieving Black and Latinx college students make meaning of and navigate affirmative action policy discourses in an era of colorblind racial politics.…

Before Heman Sweatt, an African-American from Houston, won his lawsuit to attend the University of Texas (UT) School of Law, Carlos Cadena, a Mexican-American from San Antonio, was among its brightest students. Cadena graduated summa cum laude from the law school in 1940, a decade before Sweatt's lawsuit forced UT to open its graduate and…

The Supreme Court's members generally are too decorous to exclaim "I told you so." But U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy stands perched on the edge of an I-told-you-so moment, thanks to the court's decision to take up a challenge to a race-conscious college-admission policy that poses some of the same questions he had accused…

Educational thought and research often operates with whole-race ("Black", "White", and "Asian") and whole-class ("low-income") categories. For both explaining disparities and assessing them normatively, it is essential to pay attention to subdivisions within those groups. Regarding affirmative action, on…

This article assesses the extent to which indigenous grants administered to school pupils and university students in Chile can be considered affirmative action towards social justice. Drawing on Fraser's framework for parity of participation, I question whether the grants are able to provide both redistribution and recognition for indigenous…

In partnership with Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the Center for Minority Serving Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, Salzburg Global Seminar hosted an international strategic dialogue of 60 thought leaders, researchers, and practitioners from institutions serving marginalized populations to…

The scope of this paper spans from macro-level national and inter-state comparisons to more micro-level intra-state scrutiny of systemic fault-lines shaping the contours of girls' education in India. Post independence, national level indicators have been suggestive of greater gender parity. Yet, there is more to inclusiveness of girls in Indian…

This study explores the intercultural movements toward social justice in education in the Americas, most particularly, North America, and how U.S. multicultural movements and policies influence countries like Brazil. First we analyzed the movement toward multicultural practices to understand how those are developed both in the U.S., and in Brazil.…

This study examines the effects of affirmative action bans in four states (California, Florida, Texas, and Washington) on the enrollment of underrepresented students of color within six different graduate fields of study: the natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, business, education, and humanities. Findings show that affirmative action…