Each edition of the IDRA Newsletter strives to provide many different perspectives on the issues in education topics discussed and to define its significance in the state and national dialogue. This issue focuses on Culture of Poverty vs. Culture of Possibility and includes: (1) Open Source Learning Tools Make STEM Possible in Underserved Schools…

Infants and toddlers who live in poverty are more likely to experience developmental delays or disabilities and less likely to access early intervention (EI) services. The federal initiative Race to the Top--Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) was designed to increase access to high quality early learning programs for children at risk for…

Numerous studies over the past two decades have examined the prevalence, causes, predictors, and prevention of high school dropout, but comparatively little is known about students who drop out and later re-enroll. This study contributes to an emerging body of research on re-enrollees that challenges the perception that when students drop out,…

Quad Blogging was implemented to connect students beyond classroom walls to explore social issues. Four middle school classrooms in New Jersey, Vermont, California and Qatar served as the research sites. Students engaged in collaborative inquiry around social issues, identifying a social issue specific to their context. Final products included…

This essay will discuss two educational programs to improve the living conditions of students from low income families that Pedro T. Orata conducted during the middle years of the twentieth century. The question this paper will investigate is whether Orata considered the people he was trying to help as being trapped by the conditions of poverty to…

Over the past five years, marriage equality and charter schools have emerged at the forefront of political conversations about equality and rights. Some argue that these policies extend access to certain benefits and opportunities to historically oppressed communities, thus furthering liberalism and egalitarianism. In this article, I engage these…

This article presents the case of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Pakistan's former North-West Frontier Province, and its provincial educational assessment policies and practices. These policies and practices affect millions of Culturally Linguistically Diverse and Exceptional (CLDE) children who live in rural and remote areas, and areas afflicted by…

Since the nineties, the principle of sustainable development has increasingly been adopted by policy makers and civil society in Germany and, of course, in many countries of the world. With the acceptance of this principle, the significance of education for sustainable development (ESD) has also been recognised. Increased awareness of the problems…

Children are particularly vulnerable to structured inequalities in society. Building on the work of Erich Fromm (1900-1980), this article contends that modern (post)industrial capitalism corrupts the human capacity to operate in the "being mode"--that is, in altruistic and compassionate ways. Rather, within the individualistic logic of…

Reducing the number of early school leavers, those who quit education without at least a high school degree, is a key objective of educational policy throughout Europe. Previous research has shown that in particular youngsters from disadvantaged families face relatively high risks of school dropout. In this paper we use data from the 2009 ad hoc…

Given the global escalation of gaps between rich and poor, contemporary work in critical literacy needs to overtly question the politics of poverty. How and where is poverty produced, by what means, by whom and for whom and how are educational systems stratified to provide different kinds of education to the rich and the poor? Yet rather than…

As teachers seek activities to assist students in understanding division as more than just the algorithm, they find many examples of division as fair sharing. However, teachers have few activities to engage students in a quotative (measurement) model of division. Efraim Fischbein and his colleagues (1985) defined two types of whole-number…

After completing a law degree at the University of Birmingham when I was 20 and not really knowing what I wanted to do, except that it was not law, I became an English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher accidentally through signing up as a volunteer with the British United Nations Association (BUNA), roughly equivalent to the US Peace Corps.…

We investigated the longitudinal relationship between socio-economic disadvantage (SED) and trajectories of emotional and conduct problems among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who had comorbid attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; ASD + ADHD) or not (ASD-DHD). The sample was 209 children with ASD who took part in the UK's…

The history of education in India has been looked into with a view which has been narrow in its expanse, often missing out on many social categories which had a relatively limited, yet important, presence in colonial India. Sufficient attention has been paid to the official policies of the British Indian government (starting from Macaulay's…