In this column, the author uses the analogy of baseball to describe the lives of gifted children as a vehicle to think about similarities and differences. The author states that he has experienced how educators often gloss over the powerful and all-inclusive living conditions of high-ability students from financially impoverished backgrounds. In…

The American education system is a complicated form of traditional biases that restrain personal interest to pursue an equal education. Our children cannot endure the public scrutiny that is failing in educational institutions, but should be replaced with a provision of hope.

The National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLaN) is an annual literacy and numeracy test for all Australian students, and results from the test are disaggregated into a number of categories including language background other than English (LBOTE). For this and other categories, results on each section of the test are aggregated into…

Child poverty is a global issue that affects around half the children in the world; it is inextricably bound to the poverty experienced by their parents and families and has been identified by the United Nations as a human rights issue. Child poverty can be a barrier to children and young people accessing school education or achieving any form of…

2013 was a year of positive change for millions of children, and each child has an individual story. The stories of individual children are their own; the efforts to reach them are the stories of UNICEF in 2013, and every year since the founding of UNICEF. 2013 either brought no change or violent change for far too many children, and…

Science Expos are intended to develop and empower learners to identify local problems and hence find solutions thereof using scientific processes. Science Expos are perceived as spaces for sharing experiences of science which engender love for science so that learners may ultimately pursue science-related careers. Despite these ideals, there is…

This article aims to theorise a storyline account of a collaborative three-year action research project into schooling re-engagement using a Bourdieusian framework. In the article we discuss how we (two teachers and a social worker) developed an alternative senior secondary school that re-engaged a sizable minority of marginalised young people…

Increasing educational attainment is generally tied to better employment outcomes. The vocational education and training (VET) sector is often used as an entry point into post-compulsory education for individuals who have experienced disadvantage in their lives. But does increasing participation in VET by disadvantaged individuals necessarily lead…

The four case examples presented in this brief are drawn from the Gardner Center's substantial experience conducting rigorous research in research-practice partnerships. The first case describes a partnership approach that enhances a school district's capacity to use integrated longitudinal data to tackle persistent problems of practice and…

In an education system marred by inequity, urban schools in the United States are faced with the challenge of helping students from marginalized groups succeed. While many strategies have been tried, most are built on deficit-based models that blame students and teachers for a lack of achievement and ignore the role of power within the school…

Marginalized youth of color manifest their imaginative and innovative utilization of language in a variety of ways. One area that has been understudied is how transgressive language practices allow youth to subvert and resist oppression. While these language practices are viewed as vulgar and inappropriate for school, for disenfranchised youth…

This paper explores the idea that young children's emergent literacy practices can be tools for mediating peer interaction, and that, therefore, literacy, even in its earliest stages, can support oral language development, particularly for emergent bilinguals. The paper draws on data collected during a year-long ethnographic study of 11 Nepali-…

School completion to the end of Year 12 in rural, regional, and disadvantaged communities is an acknowledged challenge in Australia and internationally. This research reports the beliefs of 86 rural and regional community leaders in the Australian state of Tasmania. A survey on issues associated with students' school completion was designed…

Successive governments have promoted academy sponsorship as a way to improve the educational achievement of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. As the academies programme has developed, policymakers have increasingly seen academy chains, and especially multi-academy trusts (MATs) as the best way of working to improve the performance of…

In an effort to assist the countries in Southeast Asia to develop more robust policies and programmes for out-of-school children (OOSC) in their respective countries, this report was commissioned to map out the current legislations, policies, characteristics, and interventions on OOSC in nine countries across the region, which include Cambodia,…