Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important…

A growing and increasingly diverse immigrant population in Spain, and in particular in the region of Catalonia, places new and challenging demands on the educational system. In this study, we use a minority language rights framework to examine how Catalan educators conceptualize the linguistic and cultural rights of immigrant students, and the…

International human rights instruments provide a legal basis for an agreed set of human values globally. These 'values' are expected to underpin the purposes and content of education. This paper aims to explore how compliance with human rights instruments and values is balanced by educational leaders in Northern Ireland where diverse…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine teaching approaches adopted by teachers in ex-Model C English medium secondary schools (former mono-ethnic White Schools) currently in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, after schools became desegregated in 1994 and changed from being mono-ethnic to multi-ethnic. Design/methodology/approach: This study…

Purpose: Despite the popularity of open enrollment as a school choice mechanism, there is little research on how principals behave in a district-run competitive setting. This study adds to our understanding of how open enrollment policies affect the role of the principal as well as educational equity by examining the roles and behaviors of school…

Education market advocates frequently argue that socioeconomically disadvantaged students could be the main beneficiaries of privatization and market policies. However, the international evidence has shown how privatization and pro-market policies have a negative impact in terms of equity, which particularly affect socioeconomically disadvantaged…

Opportunity hoarding is a sociological concept first introduced by Charles Tilly. This article explores its utility for historians by examining efforts to exclude different groups of people in a major American metropolis during the 1960s and seventies. This was a period of significant social change, as the racial composition of big city schools…

Faith schools in England are often regarded as ill-suited to cultivating the abilities, attitudes, and dispositions required for living together harmoniously in an ethnically and religiously diverse society. These concerns might be formulated in terms of the thesis that faith schools in England are considerably sub-optimal for the cultivation of…

Integrated education in Poland has been implemented since 1993. This alternative form of education very quickly resulted in an increased number of integrated classes in mainstream schools and a decreased percentage of students with disabilities in segregated education. Research indicates that the process of "opening of society to…

The topic of this study is the issue of Czech primary minority schools (ISCED 1) in the period of interwar Czechoslovakia. The specific objective is to describe the development of these type of schools as an example of the sustainability process of Czech education and erudition in general in the border areas of the interwar Czechoslovak state; in…

Background: In the United States, students' experiences are shaped by racioethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic segregation. School choice, and especially charter schools, generally exacerbate existing levels of school segregation. Counter to this trend, hundreds of intentionally diverse charter schools (IDCS), with a mission to promote school…

This article describes mutual accountability, an innovative approach to accountability which opens new possibilities for pursuing educational equity for all students. Mutual accountability calls for each stakeholder -- students, teachers, parents, and administrators -- to work collaboratively in pursuit of educational goals. The article presents…

This paper provides a historical analysis of the past century of progressive education, within the general socio-political context of schooling within the US. The purpose of this review is to create a social, historical and philosophical context for understanding the current narrative of progressive education that exists in educational policy…

Student assignment policies (SAPs) in K-12 schools can either reproduce or help ameliorate existing inequality. Some districts are trying to maintain voluntarily adopted integration policies despite the Supreme Court's recent 2007 decision in "Parents Involved," which prohibited most race-conscious school choice policies that were…

More than 60 years after the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision declared segregated schooling inherently unequal, this timely book sheds light on how and why U.S. schools are experiencing increasing segregation along racial, socioeconomic, and linguistic lines. It offers policy and programmatic alternatives for advancing equity and…