Boundary lines have long served as a mechanism to divide people, determining the quality of available resources, and ultimately, educational opportunity. In recent years, new school district boundaries have proliferated as local communities attempt to secede from larger school districts. In this study of Memphis-Shelby County, Tennessee, we extend…

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…

Traditional research often excludes the voices of marginalized populations such as African Americans, who are usually written about instead of being allowed to tell their own stories (King, 2005). This research gives African Americans the opportunity to "tell their stories" of segregation and integration. Leaving the telling of our…

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…

This response discusses the complexity of racial segregation in U.S. cities today and an emerging education movement for equity and racial justice. Racial segregation has been and continues to be a potent, and contested, strategy of containment, subordination, and exploitation, but African Americans have also, out of necessity, turned racial…

This research is a study of the educational systems of South Africa and the United States in a comparative perspective. The research examines the success and failures of the two systems, taking black student dropout rates as a case study for understanding the structural, philosophical and public policy foundations of the genesis and development of…

Six years after "Brown v. Board of Education", Atlanta reluctantly complied with the order to desegregate its school system rather than risk having schools closed due to noncompliance. Out of 132 students, nine black high school seniors desegregated four of Atlanta's all-white high schools. The purpose of this study is to explore and…

This article focuses on the El Sistema programme, which started up in Sweden in 2010 with the objective to deal with segregation problems typical for Swedish urban areas. The purpose of the article is to examine how promoting integration through music and music education is constructed within El Sistema as a way to help children growing up in…

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…

Historical racial segregation within Mississippi's public universities and colleges has led to litigation that spanned 25 years and eventually led to sweeping changes in policies and practices. Among these changes were the standardization of admission criteria and the creation of the Summer Developmental Program (SDP). This study sought to better…

At first sight, there is not much to compare, or any reason to compare, German and South African curricular frameworks. The history, nature of their respective transitions, level of development and educational legacies are very different. But the fall of the Berlin Wall and ending of apartheid brought both within a common neo-liberal global…

In this ethnographic study, we look closely at everyday classroom interactions in order to examine the complex process of creating equitable classroom communities in racially and socioeconomically diverse schools. We use the lens of relational difference (Abu El-Haj, 2006) to examine how students negotiate social boundaries within their new…

Since the first charter school law passed in Minnesota in 1991, over 40 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws allowing the publicly funded, privately managed, and semiautonomous schools of choice. Ever since the first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992, the battle for fair funding has raged across the land. On the one hand,…

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…