Educators, government officials, and other stakeholders of schools have an interest in whether family involvement affects the academic achievement of students. While some research has shown that children whose parents are involved in their education from early childhood perform academically better than do children whose parents are less involved,…

Education under neoliberal reform has been targeted as an indispensable source of profit. Market-based reforms have commodified education and are transforming public school into a corporatized industry concerned not with democracy but with the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy. Targeting public schooling as a site in which to accumulate…

As a result of the economic recession, the State of California has set in motion new policies for its community college system known as the Student Success Act, fundamentally altering open-access (Yamagata-Noji, 2014; Bennett et. al. 2013). Individuals most vulnerable to the policy shift are under-represented college students who constitute the…

During a period in which institutions have been refashioned to meet the demands of a complex social and political economy, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has helped to alter the public educational system. As scholars and researchers examine the material effects of NCLB, efforts to improve the educational system and its effects must also…

?The past decade has seen an increase in research documenting the benefi?ts of children learning through play. However, the amount of play in American kindergarten classes remains on a steady decline. ?This article compares the ?findings from a netnographic study of seventy-eight kindergarten teachers' message board discussions about play in…

Background: Local control has historically been a prominent principle in education policymaking and governance. Culminating with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), however, the politics of education have been nationalized to an unprecedented degree, and local control has all but disappeared as a principle framing education policymaking.…

Education reform policies harvested from neoliberalism, social Darwinism, consumerism, and free-market ideologies have begun to replace the pragmatic progressivism of the pre-World War II era. In this article, I use three federal and state education reform policies and programs--No Child Left Behind Act, Common Core State Standards Initiative, and…

Employing a critical race analysis of contemporary suburban schooling in the US, the author challenges the ideology of colorblind racial contexts. The concepts of colorblindness, interest-convergence, racial realism, and white privilege are used to explain how federal mandates and common school policies and practices, such as tracking, traditional…

This study examined how self-efficacy beliefs, a central construct of social cognitive theory, might be used to inform educational leadership and policy decisions related to school accountability measures. A survey of 112 principals in Florida was used to investigate the degree to which principals believed the goals of federal and state school…

This paper stresses the importance of enacting positive transformation in language policy and planning in the United States as delineated by the idea of radical localism and supported by a critical pedagogy of place. Initially, I ask the following questions: Does NCLB impact opportunities for English language learners to take part in their…

In this article, the author interprets the phenomenon of teacher research using feminist theories as a heuristic for analysis. She begins with definitions of teacher research. Following, she employs feminist theories to explain teacher research as an emancipatory act. Based on an inductive analysis of the literature, she discusses three arguments:…

It is widely believed that the end of Nazism, and the postwar era brought an end to academic theories and discourses regarding inherent racial inferiority. There was little tolerance Hawkins (1997) argues, for biological justifications for racism, war, and exploitation. The infamous Social Darwinism of key intellectual Herbert Spencer, and its…

In this study, the authors examined the school experiences of middle-class African American parents and students, because they are largely overlooked in the professional literature when it comes to underachievement and parent involvement. Although No Child Left Behind (NCLB) highlights parent involvement and school accountability through the use…

In this article, the author discusses "Wiki-ality" and "truthiness"--notions that explain a lot about life in the 21st century. Both words were coined by Stephen Colbert, an American comedian and actor. Colbert coined the word "Wiki-ality" based on Wikipedia, a popular online encyclopedia which seems far more…

Scholars have provided numerous critical analyses of the structural causes of poverty. Unfortunately, many teachers are still led to believe, via best selling books and mainstream discourse, that behaviors, neighborhoods, and families determine educational outcomes. This "culture of poverty" theory must be disproved; educators need to be…