This paper is one of two which bring together leading educational researchers to consider some of the key challenges facing democracy and education during the twenty-first century, including rising social and economic inequality, political instability, and the existential threats of global pandemics and climate change. In this paper, key…

In "Can Education Change Society?" (Apple, 2013), Apple described a number of tasks in which the critical scholar/activist needs to engage. Among them are telling the truth about what is happening in the creation of inequalities, illuminating spaces of possibility, and acting as the critical secretary of the movements and people who…

In education, the areas of critical policy studies, critical cultural studies, and critical curriculum studies all owe a good deal to a number of people. Among them are Paulo Freire, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, and Antonio Gramsci. Yet no such listing would be complete without the inclusion of Stuart Hall. The two books I…

Over the years that I have been writing the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I have paid particular attention to critical conceptual and empirical work that either overtly supports or directly challenges the taken-for-granted assumptions that tend to guide dominant policies in education. These policies may deal with larger issues…

Given the increasingly global nature of marketized school choice policies, this makes it even more crucial to investigate how the multiple scales, forms, and emphases of school choice in different countries are influenced by particular political, economic, and cultural conditions. While much of the critical research on school choice policies has…

Bourdieu's version of field theory has had an impressive impact on the ways that sociologists of education conceptualize educational practices. These accounts tend to focus on the varying levels of ontological complicity established between students' cultural dispositions and educational institutions. In this paper, the wisdom of these…

In the process of discussing the significant contributions that Len Barton has made to the sociology of education and to disability studies, I argue that a good deal of critical analyses of power and inequality in education are impoverished by some of their essentialist and reductive tendencies. I use an example taken from disability rights to…

The documentary "Waiting for Superman" has become one of those rare things, a (supposed) documentary that generates a wider audience. It also is one of the more recent embodiments of what Nancy Fraser (1989) labels as the "politics of needs and needs discourses." Dominant groups listen carefully to the language and issues that…

This article examines equality in education within the context of two larger conflicts--the breakdown of the largely liberal consensus that guided much educational and social policy since World War II and the growth of the new right and conservative movements. (IAH)

Argues that the ultimate effect of many recent educational "reforms" will be to exacerbate existing inequalities. Examines how such inequalities are publicly justified by the use of moral and biological logic systems. Explores the use of these arguments, such as those crystallized in Herrnstein and Murray's "Bell Curve," to…

Discusses the need to relate an understanding of the experience of schooling to the cultural and economic conditions of society. The work of Paul Willis is used to exemplify the processes by which a dominant class establishes ideological hegemony and legitimates and maintains an existing social order. (Author/MLF)

This article describes and analyzes the encroachment of economic interests, ideologies, and procedures into the educational system, and discusses the impact of this encroachment on social equality in our society. (IAH)

The ideology behind the educational justifications for a national curriculum and national testing can damage members of society who have the most to lose. The paper analyzes the conservative agenda, discusses connections between national curricula and testing, increasing privatization, and choice plans, and notes resulting patterns of differential…

Responds to Romberg's reaction and argues that the present conservative social context will determine the use to which the "Standards" are put. Expresses concern that unequal school finance policies in providing technologically rich classroom environments will result in educational stratification. (MDH)

Discusses Paulo Freire's theories about the nature of differential power and the effects of the politics of exclusion and oppression. Contends it is not possible to understand "reforms" in education and society without placing race at the center of one's critical analysis. (Contains 5 notes and 31 references.) (Author/MLF)