Twenty years after Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, deeply entrenched inequalities and injustices are still at the core of the country's social fabric. South Africa's public and private sectors continue to battle with the situation and higher education institutions are no exception. The South African Ministry of Education has…

As international standards are continually publicized, countries across the globe have adapted educational policies to meet the demands of the global market, which has led to much emphasis on specific subjects and teaching methods. Although modern educational policies tend to focus on rhetoric about inclusion, systematic segregation remains in…

In light of contemporary school choice proposals and the 60th anniversary of the Southern Manifesto, the Prince Edward County, Virginia public schools crisis provides interesting historical discussion. Prince Edward County (PEC), a rural community in central Virginia, was one of five school districts represented in the 1954 "Brown v. Board of…

"Doing Justice to History" challenges everyday racism in society and offers counter-stories to the singular narratives that still prevail among national historians and in school curricula. It will be a key resource for the annual Black History Month in both the UK and the US. But the book's key purpose is to argue for deeper and…

Universities in South Africa during apartheid reflected the racialised politics of the period. This gave rise to divisive descriptors such as "historically white/black"; "English/Afrikaans-speaking" institutions and "Bantustan'' universities. These descriptors signal a hierarchy of social status and state funding. We start…

Realization of a multiracial democracy is challenged like never before by a new era of color-blind politics and postracial supposition, fueled in part by the election of our first black President in 2008, but contradicted by the chronic persistence of racial segregation and social inequality.

Fifty years ago, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." In exploring the story of the events behind the essay, and the Supreme Court case that resulted, "Walker v. Birmingham", 399 U.S. 307 (1967), educators will find a pedagogically powerful lens through which to review the seminal…

A key factor in providing quality education is the main language of instruction (M-LoI). This creates a challenging situation for education policymakers in post-colonial multilingual countries such as South Africa. Language-in-education policies must valorise indigenous languages and redress their exclusion in past education systems while ensuring…

This study uses a year of ethnographic fieldwork, over 50 informal ethnographic interviews in a racially diverse neighborhood in Milwaukee, WI, and formal interviews with 30 neighborhood residents, workers, and business owners, to examine how neighborhood residential diversity affects cross-racial interactions there. The study found that, despite…

Population censuses record considerable volumes of personal information, which when aggregated and tabulated provide significant insights into national societies. South African censuses have recorded levels of educational attainment since their inception in the mid-nineteenth century, initially measuring literacy and later the level of education…

This research considers how Mexican American history becomes part of the curricular canon, and what their inclusion tells us about popular conceptions of Mexican Americans. At a time of increasing presence of Latina/o students in K-12 classrooms, it is important to consider how we depict their experiences in U.S. history. To address this concern,…

This article argues that we have lost the plot in South African reading education. To find it, we need to move beyond the predominant mode of reading as oral performance, where the emphasis is on accuracy and pronunciation, to reading as comprehension of meaning in text. While reading research in South Africa has been conducted mainly in school…

A new report by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), "Differences by Design?," compares differences in approaches and demographics between and among charter school models and local "traditional public schools." Using three national data sets, the report effectively captures the national universe of charter schools. It…

We examine the impact of charter schools on school integration in the Little Rock, Arkansas metropolitan area. We find that charters are less likely to be hyper-segregated than traditional public schools (TPS), but TPS have compositions more closely reflecting the region. However, differences in each case are slight. Using student-level data to…

This paper explores a curriculum paradox that may arise for teachers in post-authoritarian regimes if a radically new curriculum, designed to prepare learners for democratic citizenship, requires them to be autonomous professionals. If teachers were originally schooled and trained under the old regime to follow the orders inscribed in syllabi and…