In the 1990s, teachers' and other educators' salaries increased enough to make Georgia number one in salaries in the South and solidly in the Midwest across the nation. Since 2004, school districts have been trying to make do with much less as this recession continues to force more cuts. Georgia has a very high unemployment rate of 10.25%, a high…

The reform of education funding systems to achieve greater equity and adequacy is an ongoing struggle in many states. Because funding of public elementary and secondary education is constitutionally a state responsibility, the struggle plays out largely in state legislatures. At the same time, education finance reform does not take place in a…

Speaking about "the student experience" has become common-place in higher education and the phrase has acquired the aura of a sacred utterance in UK higher education policy over the last decade. A critical discourse analysis of selected higher education policy texts reveals what "the student experience" has come to signify, and…

This article uses critical race theory, court opinions, newspapers, and interviews to explain how the burden of busing for desegregation was placed upon Blacks in Nashville, Tennessee and why the agenda of the litigants in the Kelley v. Metropolitan Board of Education cases shifted over time. The deliberate pace of the initial desegregation…

There is no shared understanding of what school leaders are expected to do. Schools have many external as well as internal stakeholders and each of them has different expectations as to leadership practice. Thus school leadership is a "fluid signifier". This article first outlines external expectations that school leaders are faced with…

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child includes children's right to participation in processes that affect them. In this article we caution that in order to give real content to participation, it is necessary to understand what participation is and to acknowledge the problematic nature of the concept. We then demonstrate, by…

This article provides an initial look at Race to the Top as it relates to professional development for arts educators. Topics include the philosophy of Race to the Top education reform, data informed professional development, performance pay, and how these changes may affect arts educators.

The authors describe themes of cultural persistence, political resistance, and hope in the art of one Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Midwestern United States. The themes are described across three contexts: community mural art, poetry from students in an alternative high school, and poetry from seventh grade students in a neighborhood middle…

Civil rights, business, and education advocates are warning that Congress and the Obama administration may be willing to defang a key portion of the No Child Left Behind Act in their quest to make the law more flexible, shortchanging racial minorities and other historically overlooked student subgroups in the process. Their concern comes amid…

Principal turnover has the potential to impact seriously school morale and values as teachers attempt to adjust to new administrators and their possible shifts in focus. In an era of mandated school improvement, teachers in schools with new administrators have to deal not only with changes in district, state and/or provincial policies, but also…

Messy collaboration refers to complexity, unpredictability and management dilemmas when educators work together. Such messiness was evident in a Hong Kong English Learning Study, a structured cyclical process in which teachers and researcher-participants from a teacher education institution work collaboratively on effective student learning. This…

The authors analyse the reasons for Croatian higher education reform since 2003, as well as its consequences. The main proposition of the paper is that the implementation of the Bologna Process in Croatia has failed due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the goals of the process, a lack of correspondence between the cycles of higher education…

Recounting the controversy surrounding a town hall meeting on "illegal" Latino immigration at a two-year college in North Georgia, this ethnographic narrative details the aftermath that ensued and its consequences for an ESL basic writing instructor. Fallout included the potential loss of her job, the rumored reallocation of a $5 million…

According to recent U.S. Census Bureau (2009) data, more than 20% of residents speak a language other than English. Today, 22.3% of U.S. children in Grades K-12 are Latino, and 21% speak a language other than English at home (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010). In California, nearly half (44.8%) of all children in the K-12 system…

In 1962 the Swedish Parliament decided on a school reform. Meritocracy and equal opportunity were important goals. However, these ideals were not applied to elementary school teacher education, where a sex quota policy favoured male applicants. In the parliamentary debate, a woman member of the Right Wing Party raised objections to the policy. A…