There is a faltering sense of democracy in America's current political climate due to polarized opinions about leadership's decisions and antagonistic political parties. John Dewey (1916) proposed that education is the place to foster democracy, as schools can provide a platform to actively engage students in authentic democratic experiences that…

Henry A. Giroux claims this to be the "worst of times" for US public education. Not alone in this judgment, numerous other scholars stand in agreement with him. These thinkers view the current corporate/accountability/testing movement, with its iron grip on public school policies, as disfiguring and disparaging the US system of public…

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 last few decades have seen many attempts to "reform" education across the world. Those reforms have been spurred on by the perceived low standards, by the number of young people who are seen to be educational failures, and by the need for a "skilled workforce" if our respective countries are to compete successfully in an…

In this article, Angela Hurley ponders a question centered on how well P-12 schooling experiences and the current accompanying education discourse on the importance of attending college actually match with traditional notions of the purposes of academic life held by college faculty. Does the current, performance data-driven system of P-12…

The work of schools is teaching and learning. However, the current educational culture is dominated by three characteristics: (1) the mechanistic view of organization and its practice based on the assembly line model where students progress along a value added conveyor; (2) the predominance of the Essentialist philosophy of education, in which the…

President Obama recently described America's current economic, societal, educational, and technological circumstances as "our generation's 'Sputnik' moment." If history repeats itself in the twenty-first century, music educators may face a situation similar to that which developed in the 1960s concerning the impact of education reform on…

In this address, the author builds the case that a new political economy of education, dominated by what Pauline Lipman calls the "neo-liberal social imaginary," is changing the moral context in which educators imagine their professional roles. The author argues that educators are placed in relation to others in rather complicated…

The objective of the study was to document and analyze the justifications given by federal institutions of the United States for governmental control of mathematics education as function of the achievement gaps (AGs) in mathematics. We wanted to shed light on the discourses made in the public arena that have legitimized this control and firmly…

A consensus is emerging about how school leaders affect school performance, and how important principals are to improved student learning. Yet the national reform policies--No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (RTT)--incorporate assumptions about school and district leadership that are very much at odds with this research. NCLB and RTT call…

Schools of education have seen many changes over the last 100 years (Labaree 2004). More recent modifications have included the slow and steady elimination of the social foundations of education in lieu of a more direct attention to teacher skills and basic training. The increased focus on the so-called "nuts and bolts" of teacher…

What relevance does John Dewey have for students and teachers of the 21st century? Can his educational philosophy be reconciled with "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) and its emphasis on accountability and high-stakes testing? In this article, the authors discuss Dewey's ideas about the child and the curriculum; delineate how teacher…

Many people rightly consider John Dewey a distinctively American thinker. He was born into a time-honored New England culture. He was educated in American schools. He lived and worked virtually his entire life in the United States. He had a lifelong respect for American traditions in poetry, literature, philosophy, and more. He was active in…

Schooling in the U.S. is increasingly understood through the lenses of science and accountability. From the National Research Council's Scientific Research in Education (SRE) to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), colleges and schools have faced a marked increase (or steady reinforcement) in practices which conform to principles of scientific…

This article is the second in a series (see Willis, 2011) that looks at the current status of instructional design scholarship and theory. In this concluding article, the focus is on two cultures of ID work, one based on constructivist and interpretivist theory and the other based on critical theory and critical pedagogy. There are distinct…