The co-operative movement is currently exploring ways of engaging with changes in government education policy to develop schools with a distinctive co-operative ethos. While drawing on the opportunities in changing policy, these initiatives can also be seen as offering alternatives to the prevailing tenor of government thinking. This is not the…

In this article, the author reports on an awareness of controversial incidents on campuses around North America surrounding "politically correct" speech codes and thought control measures instituted at the behest of faculty and students of this ideological persuasion. It seems that critical theory is going beyond "critical…

This review is premised on the idea that poststructuralist theorising, particularly deconstructive conceptual ideas, is often seen as incongruent with research focused on social justice. Poststructuralism--if one can risk homogenising it into the one singular category given the variety of nuances--is considered anti-foundationalist. The utility of…

This paper focuses on the socialist underpinnings of education policies in three small (and micro) states: Guyana, Jamaica and Grenada. It explores the role of education underneath ideological pluralism in constructing socialist citizens through cooperative socialism in Guyana, democratic socialism in Jamaica and revolutionary socialism in…

Modern bureaucracy faces trade-offs between public and congressional input and agency expertise. The U.S. Forest Service offers an opportunity to quantitatively analyze whether an agency that is required to be more open to the public and congressional input will be forced to ignore its technical expertise in managing resources. This study uses…

For years, the St. Louis school district has experienced the convergence of two trend lines school superintendents hope never to see: rising employee-pension costs and falling student enrollment. Despite years of fully funding its share of the teacher-pension plan, the proportion of the St. Louis district's budget tied up in paying benefits for…

Nearly 25 years after New Jersey first took control of a troubled school district, a proposed state takeover of the Camden public schools sheds a critical spotlight on that state's long--and still mostly unsuccessful--record of trying to right struggling districts through such intervention. The state began running the public schools in Jersey City…

There are good reasons to press President Obama and his education advisors right now to both rethink the direction of educational reform as well as to reignite the national conversation regarding school change. A second-term president faces a moment where it's natural to analyze past practices and decide to either "stay the course or to…

The way in which societies around the globe are governed is changing towards more flexible and networked forms where the government is not the sole and main responsible actor in the organisation, funding, delivery and evaluation of public services. Analysing the new roles of philanthropic organisations, think tanks and business organisations is a…

The publication of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 (Cosgrove et al., 2010; Perkins et al., 2010) reading literacy results heralded a crisis of confidence in educational standards in Ireland. This article examines the national and international context of teacher education reform and the politics of the policy…

Recent research and theoretical work on whiteness in teaching highlights reific, monolithic discourses that position white teachers as deficient, resistant, naive, and ignorant. I seek to complicate similar reductive portrayals through a two-year case of one high school teacher's racial identities and subjectivities in and beyond the English…

In the face of competition from other nations, higher education in the United States has slipped from the status it has enjoyed over the years. With the economic downturn and changing demographics, new challenges have emerged that necessitate reevaluation of higher education policies. One consistent trend in recent years has been the steady…

The authors facilitated a structured discussion on transgenerational activism at the 2011 meeting of the Association of Women in Psychology (AWP). Their discussion there had been sparked by an essay recently published by "Harpers" magazine in which Susan Faludi (2010) characterized a generational strife among the feminist "waves." Still catalyzed…

In this paper, we evaluate, and highlight the tensions between, radical, critical and Marxist education as they have played out in British education since the Enlightenment. Our argument has several parts. First, like other Marxists, we believe that consciousness is shifted as much through engagement with class struggle as through ideas. We…

This article utilizes critical social theory to illuminate structures of inequality that undergird certain practices of internationalization in higher education institutions, particularly in U.S. institutions. We demonstrate how such theory can be productively employed to analyze three key dimensions of contemporary internationalization: 1) a…