This article focuses on the educational efforts of Syed Firoz Ashraf in the East Jogeshwari area of Mumbai and places his work in the context of the increasing communalisation of social life and education in a poor working class suburb in Mumbai city. Muslim community has been ghettoised in the metropolis to specific areas especially since the…

School shootings loom large in the collective imagination and young, White males commit a majority of these horrific crimes. Although many of the descriptions of school shooters in the media and scholarly studies attribute their actions to psychological problems and/or personal/social failings, these events are also often placed in a comparative…

Through the second half of the 1990s and into the early years of the 21st century, public attention to the plight of poor black Americans seemed to wane. There was scant media attention to the problem of concentrated urban poverty (neighborhoods in which a high percentage of the residents fall beneath the federally designated poverty line), little…

Few had heard of Irena Sendlerowa in 1999. Now, after more than 290 presentations of the student play "Life in a Jar," as well as a website with high traffic, and worldwide media attention, Irena is known to the world. Irena Sendler (as she became known), a social worker, believed in standing up for others. Her father, who was a doctor,…

America is failing its young Black boys. In metropolitan ghettos, rural villages and midsized townships across the country, schools have become holding tanks for populations of Black boys who have a statistically higher probability of walking the corridors of prison than the halls of college. Across America, the problem of Black male achievement…

Measuring student intelligence has been problematic in the United States since standardized testing first began in the early 1900s. The omnipresence of standardized testing in student populations is illustrated by the most popular contemporary tests which are used by some scholars to advance the notion that intelligence differences between whites…

Transnationalism and the experience of migrancy has lead to cultural dissonance for many newcomers from Muslim countries, unaccustomed to the culturally permissive social norms like consuming alcohol and partying, dating and premarital relations. Residing within culturally incongruent spaces, migrant Muslim communities often seek to shelter their…