Educational transitions are crucial sites of social selection. Whereas social bias in teacher recommendations is well-established, less is known about teacher guidance in the process preceding the actual choice. Bridging the literature on social class and educational choice and home-school relations this study explores classed patterns in the…

As part of neoliberal reforms, evidence-based practice is increasingly influencing teachers' work. In Norway, the American programme 'School-Wide Positive Behavioural Intervention and Support' (SW_PBIS) has been implemented in a great number of schools. One school experienced an intense conflict with parents, so that eventually it opted out of the…

In this memoir, I accounted several episodes of my childhood of a middle class family in early 1990s in a Chinese urban city. Two major discourses permeated my account: the nationalism and socialism discourse and the upward social mobility discourse. While my family and I cherish the comfort and joy of everyday life enjoyed in the era of…

On November 8, 2016, while the rest of the world anxiously awaited the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, a subset of voters with a keen interest in education had their eyes on Massachusetts. This was the day Bay Staters would vote on Ballot Question 2, a proposal to raise the state's cap on public charter schools by up to 12 new schools…

Four studies explored the abilities of 80 adults and 180 children (4-9 years), from predominantly middle-class families in the Northeastern United States, to use information about machines' observable functional capacities to infer their internal, "hidden" mechanistic complexity. Children as young as 4 and 5 years old used machines'…

Elitism has been an issue in Canadian French immersion since its inception. This study examines how two racially diverse Ontarian school boards and Ontario French immersion policy, curricula, and other related documents construct and support an elite student within the immersion program. The elite student who emerged from immersion documents is a…

Schooling has long been studied for its role in class formation and reproduction, Australian government secondary schools have also traditionally been associated with 'the local' and with 'nation building'. Some schools might now also be engaged with ideas of the 'the global' not only through policy practices and priorities, but also through the…

Purpose: In many middle-class families in Turkey, mothers typically occupy a mediator role in father-child communications, meaning that messages between fathers and children (particularly regarding an important subject) are sent through mothers. This phenomenological study investigates Turkish father-child communication dynamics, the roles of…

The federal Pell Grant was designed to help low-income students pay for college. But over the past two decades, a growing share of middle-income students have become eligible for the program. This was not policymakers' explicit goal. This report examines how the program came to increasingly provide students from middle-income families with grants,…

Despite the wide-ranging scholarship on the educational attitudes held by native-born members of the middle and working class, few researchers have examined the impact of class on the attitudes of new arrivals. This article addresses this gap using data gathered through an ethnographic study conducted among 30 newly arrived refugee and immigrant…

The Japanese community in Singapore comprises mainly white-collar workers and their families. This article addresses issues concerning education, overseas living, and identity-related investments made visible by way of examining schooling and parenting practices. Framed within a critique which recognizes schooling and identity investment as being…

Various sociological perspectives have been applied to facilitate school choice research over the past two decades, as showcased in this "2020 Yearbook of Politics of Education Association." Among them, Pierre Bourdieu's concepts and theories stand out as a catalyst for the field's sociological development. My first objective in this…

In recent years, much attention has been given to extremely poor levels of learning outcomes in low-and lower-middle income countries. Citizen-led assessments have played a vital role in highlighting this "learning crisis." Having developed these citizen-led assessments, members of the People's Action for Learning (PAL) Network are now…

Much research on the role of race in education focuses on young people with a migrant background. The racial experiences of 'white' children are under-researched, especially in the Netherlands. This article examines whether 'white' Dutch working-class students experience white privilege and if so, how they make use of it as a 'resource' in their…

This article focuses on middle-class parent activism in the Israeli policy-making arena. In recent decades, public education governance in Israel has been moving gradually from a quasi-social democratic mode to a neoliberal one. Two e-mobilizations of middle-class parents are studied: the 'Strollers Protest' of 2011 and the 'Sardines Protest' of…