This article investigates how affluent students made sense of social justice issues that were embedded in mathematics learning activities. I present 2 case studies of such activities at the intermediate and secondary levels in 2 different schools. The analysis draws on video records and classroom artifacts and applies the theoretical framework of…

Drawing upon two ethnographic studies of affluent and elite co-educational secondary schools in the United States, Weis and Cipollone spotlight the explicit "class work" of a now highly insecure middle/upper middle class, as they attempt to maintain advantage via entrance to particularly located post-secondary destinations. Affirming the…

This practitioner action research using qualitative techniques of gathering data looks at the experiences of students in a mostly white, upper-middle class suburb who enrolled in a class that integrated mathematics with social justice issues. The researcher designed the curriculum and co-taught the one semester course. The data were collected from…

Studies illustrate that achievement gaps between poor and non-poor children already exist at kindergarten (Lee & Burkham, 2002). The larger the gap at the time children enter school, the harder it is to close the gap. This article reviews a case study of one Midwest school district and their attempt at reducing the achievement gap through the…

This mixed methods study investigated the impact of learning about homelessness on the civic development of privileged adolescents. Pre-post surveys, classroom observations, and qualitative interviews revealed that the participating adolescents developed a more complex understanding of the factors that contribute to homelessness; however, this…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the experience of white principals in understanding their white identity, privilege, and power as they worked to implement socially-just and culturally proficient schools. The findings offer insights into the following questions: 1) How do white school leaders view white identity and the impact,…

We apply cohort techniques to monitor four indicators of socio-demographic risk crucial to family wellbeing; namely, income, employment, education, and housing. The data were derived from New Zealand's five-yearly Census for the period 1981-2006. This allowed us to track birth cohorts of mothers (and their families) over six successive New Zealand…

The objective of this work is to reflect on unequal schooling opportunities in Brazil, focusing on certain characteristics that mark, nowadays, the schooling trajectories of young people from middle- and high-income families. Our previous researches showed that an important part of these families are increasingly investing in international…

One of the main goals of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was to hold schools accountable for ensuring that all students are meeting high academic standards, and to eliminate disparities in academic performance between traditionally advantaged and disadvantaged groups of students. One could argue that this focus on holding schools accountable…

Although income and happiness have been linked at both the individual and national levels of analysis, few studies have specifically examined the different relationships between these two variables in affluent nations. This study investigates various measures of well-being in both the United States and Denmark. Respondents in both countries…

Policymakers aiming to close the well-documented achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students have increasingly turned their attention to issues of teacher quality. A number of studies have demonstrated that teachers are inequitably distributed across student subgroups by input measures like experience and qualifications, as well…

While many understand the need for improved pedagogy in advanced graduate school education regarding issues of race and racism, we also need to better understand what happens in classrooms when issues of racism are centered in the pedagogy. I employed qualitative methods to examine what happened when racism and antiracism were taken up as explicit…

Informed by "critical" approaches to "educational technology", this paper aims to move away from presenting a "could" and "should" explanation of children learning with technology to a more nuanced, context-rich analyses of how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being used by technologically privileged families at home. Here, a…

Universities in the United States and elsewhere are increasingly enrolling an elite group of international students who not only are able to pay the high tuition and other expenses of U.S.-based universities, but also are personally familiar with several countries and cultures. These students are part of a new global economic and cultural elite.…

The white middle-class parents who chose to send their children to urban comprehensives largely rejected engaging in the usual competitiveness for educational success. Nevertheless the parents in our study still found themselves wittingly or otherwise captured by that same discourse. Their children are high achievers and are regarded as a valuable…