A challenge that professional development coordinators and instructional leaders face is designing and implementing professional development that is the most effective for improving teaching and learning in their school. To determine what is the perceptions and beliefs of elementary teachers' value of and responses to their professional…

The principal aim of this article is to describe and document a comparison of public and private school effectiveness in the marginalized (often referred to as slum) district of Aguablanca, in the city of Cali, Colombia. The data suggest that teachers and parents are largely satisfied with the current status of education provision in Aguablanca.…

The Oregon Statewide Report Card is an annual publication required by law (ORS 329.115), which reports on the state of Oregon's public schools. The purpose of the Statewide Report Card is to monitor trends among school districts and Oregon's progress toward achieving the goals referred to in ORS 329.015. This report also provides a tool that makes…

As a result of the U.S. Department of Education's near one-billion-dollar investment in the "Teaching American History" ("TAH") grant program since 2001, almost 1,200 projects have taken place in school districts around the country with the important aim of improving the teaching of American history in K-12 classrooms. The…

This paper explores young people's perceptions of vocational education and training (VET) in England. It draws on interview and focus-group data from a funded project. Parallel studies were carried out in The Netherlands, South Africa and England. This study reports on the English project. It found that serendipity, contingent events and influence…

In this article, Michelle J. Bellino explores contrasting approaches to civic education in two rural schools serving indigenous Maya youth in post-civil war Guatemala. Through comparative ethnography, she examines how youth civic pathways intersect with legacies of authoritarianism while young people shape their identity as members of historically…

International studies show that the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) on learning has increased in a number of countries and that poverty is a risk factor that puts children's academic performance at risk. However, there are students who, despite living in impoverished conditions, achieve solid academic performance. How they do so is a question…

The paper reviews quantitative and qualitative research evidence regarding the relationship between intercultural education and academic achievement among students from socially marginalized communities. Intercultural education is conceptualized as including a focus both on generating understanding and respect for diverse cultural traditions and…

Great performance is a wonder to observe. We may notice creativity, excellent technique, or content mastery. What we may not notice is a set of mental and social skills that allow a person to show his or her best work. This article recommends that these psychosocial skills be explicitly and deliberately cultivated via programming, coaching, and…

Privileged benefaction in elite schools and the moral dilemmas, contradictions and power politics involved are the focus of this paper. The notion of "the gift" provides our analytical lens. We concentrate on two girls' schools--one in South Africa and one in England. These were both built, in various ways, on the British model of public…

This article takes the role of provocateur to "queer(y)" the rules of intelligibility surrounding new schooling accountabilities. Butler's work is seldom used outside the arena of gender and sexualities research. A "queer(y)ing" methodology is subsequently applied in a context very different to where it is frequently…

This paper is concerned with the rise of 'the boot camp' as a means of addressing "the problem of troubled youth" in contemporary industrialised nations such as Australia and the UK. Drawing on a corpus of publicly available material including press releases and policy documents, media reports, and programme websites, the paper explores…

The gendered and racialized narrative of Black male adolescents in urban spaces is one often fraught with deficit-based assumptions and presuppositions about their abilities, competencies, and proclivities with regard to schooling in general and mathematics in particular. Yet despite these conventional beliefs, compounded by the dearth of Black…

This is a semi-ethnographic study of three schools that were closed in a marginal community in Santiago, Chile. The school closing process was violent with many social and psychological negative consequences for guardians and students. The guardians of the students of these schools decided to take over the schools and fight against the local…

This study investigated differences in difficulty among three types of math board games used as curricular materials in some preschool classrooms. Difference in performance between low- and middle-income children on the three types of games was also explored. Children drew cards containing one to five large dots; they then attempted to place an…