An enduring concern for educational policy in many affluent countries is the endemic nature of educational inequalities that are predominately located in poor urban contexts. Given the inabilities of school reform "per se" to deal with these inequalities, the paper focuses on issues of scarcity and spatial processes that are implicated…

An increasing body of literature documents considerable inequalities in the health of young children in the United States, though maternal depression is one important, yet often overlooked, determinant of children's health. In this article, the author uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,048) and finds that maternal…

Considerable policy and academic attention has been focused on the topic of food deserts. We consider this topic from an economic perspective. First, we consider how the components of a standard economic analysis apply to the study of food deserts. Second, using this economic lens, we revisit the empirical literature on food deserts to assess the…

Drawing from critical theories in education, this article empirically examines the role that public schools can play as conduits for critical peace education, particularly for young people who have been historically marginalized from school. Based on two years of ethnographic data collection at a public high school in New York City, I explore how…

The United States has a scarcity of capable principals ready to successfully lead schools in an era of outcome-based accountability. This is especially true in high-poverty, high-minority schools. Policy makers welcome opening the principal pipeline to untraditional leaders. Research finds that teachers who have entered education through Troops to…

This author states that, since the civil rights movement, Americans have documented and decried--but done little to decrease--the achievement gap. This gulf, one of many that divide people by race and class, has festered in part because the larger question of inequitable investment in poor communities of color has long been neglected.…

Momentous changes are occurring in American education at a rapid pace, and with far too little deliberation about their value and likely consequences. The most dramatic, and possibly most significant, is the federal Department of Education's quiet but firm assumption of control of the nation's public schools. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is…

This paper examines the implications of policy fracture and arms length governance within the decision-making processes currently shaping curriculum design within the English education system. In particular, it argues that an unresolved "ideological fracture" at the government level has been passed down to school leaders whose response…

This article reports on a research project that studied the approaches to leadership adopted by head teachers in one local authority in an area of extreme social deprivation in northern England. Using data from semi-structured interviews which was analysed using three software packages, it examines how far the heads use either transactional or…

The academic achievement gap that exists between middle class White and non-White and poor students is well-documented. As policy-makers and educational leaders in South Carolina grapple with the academic achievement gap between White and non-White students, it has become increasingly important for them to include the growing Hispanic population…

During a two-year period from 2000-2002, California awarded a $20,000 Governor's Teaching Fellowship (GTF) to 1,169 people enrolled in traditional, post-baccalaureate teacher licensure programs who agreed to teach in low-performing public schools for four years after earning their licenses. The GTF was a policy response to longstanding evidence…

Pathways' students in Regent Park now talk about a new culture of expectation. They bristle at, and obviously reject, most of the labels the media and others place on them and, by extension, their community. They say words such as disadvantaged, poor, violent, and at-risk--to cite a few--do not address the fullness of reality and life in their…

In recent decades, increasing numbers of studies have focused on metacomprehension accuracy, or readers' ability to distinguish between texts comprehended more vs. less well. Following early findings that suggested readers are fairly poor at doing so, a number of studies have identified specific tasks to supplement a single reading of text that…

In this article, the authors expand the view of parental consultation to include advocacy and empowerment as important contextual considerations. A brief review of existing approaches to parent consultation is provided. Selected advances in multicultural parent consultation are also presented. An advocacy- and empowerment-focused perspective is…

This article discusses the effort of U.S. Rep. James Clyburn to help historically overlooked constituents and disadvantaged students get to go to college through his annual Rudolph Canzater Memorial Golf Classic. Elected to Congress in 1992 after a nearly 20-year stint as an appointed state official, he worked his way through the Democratic Party…