Virtual Library

In this article, Ricardo Stanton-Salazar offers a network-analytic framework for understanding the socialization and schooling experiences of working-class racial minority youth. Unlike many previous writers who have examined the role of "significant others," he examines the role that relationships between youth and institutional agents, such as teachers and counselors, play in the greater multicultural context in which working-class minority youth must negotiate. Stanton-Salazar provides the conceptual foundations of a framework built around the concepts of social capital and institutional support. He concentrates on illuminating those institutional and ideological forces that he believes make access to social capital and institutional support within schools and other institutional settings so problematic for working-class minority children and adolescents. Stanton-Salazar also provides some clues as to how some working-class minority youth are able to manage their difficult participation in multiple worlds, how they develop cultural strategies for overcoming various obstacles, and how they manage to develop sustaining and supportive relationships with institutional agents.

Desegregation has been one of the only legally enforceable routes of access and opportunity for millions of school children. Yet even as the nation celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Gary Orfield, Director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, began to attract national attention by identifying and documenting the insidious trend toward the resegregation of our public schools.

This paper aims to explore and develop a theoretical approach for children’s rights research in education formed through an encounter between the sociology of childhood and John Dewey’s educational theory. The interest is mainly methodological, in the sense that the primary ambition of the investigation is to suggest a fruitful and useful theoretical base for formulating research problems and undertaking research in children’s rights in education. The paper argues that, particularly in educational settings, research into children’s rights can and must be attributed to children both as full-status humans in a socio-politically contextual present, and as continually growing and changing, immature and dependent humans. From the theoretical encounter suggested in the paper, the much-used distinction of the child as either ‘being’ or ‘becoming’ can be reconsidered, and another point of departure for the study of children’s rights issues in education can be discerned.

I examine the current movement for children's rights in the United States in terms of the history of child saving, and of the recent events concerning human rights. I stress the conflicts between the salvation and liberation of children, especially in the areas of education and justice. I also consider various approaches to children's rights to define the current movement, and review recent concerns so that I may clarify future needs and strategies.

This book examines what is happening, in the context of segregated and unequal public education, to children from poor families in the inner cities and less affluent suburbs, and describes how children of poor families get less real education, less hope, and less concern than children from rich families. Chapter 1 of the book examines the causes and impact of the spiritual, racial, and economic isolation confronting the residents and public school students of East St. Louis, Illinois. In chapter 2, the loss of factories and increase in gangs, reliance on low-paid teacher substitutes, disparity in funding between schools, and other negative factors impacting the lives of school-aged children on the south side of Chicago are discussed. Chapter 3 explores expenditures per pupil and inequities in staffing and supplies, and identifies the denial of the means of competition as the most consistent outcome of the public education offered to poor children in New York and other large cities. In chapter 4, the plight of children's education in Camden, New Jersey, the nation's fourth-poorest city, is described. Chapter 5 notes the District of Columbia's dual system of education, in which magnet schools attract the wealthiest children and poor schools attract the poorest children. Finally, in chapter 6, incidents of inequalities in the public school system in San Antonio, Texas, are discussed.

The Black Revolution on Campus is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Black students demanded that public universities serve their communities; that private universities rethink the mission of elite education; and that black colleges embrace self-determination and resist the threat of integration. Most crucially, black students demanded a role in the definition of scholarly knowledge.<br> <br> <br> <br> Martha Biondi masterfully combines impressive research with a wealth of interviews from participants to tell the story of how students turned the slogan "black power" into a social movement. Vividly demonstrating the critical linkage between the student movement and changes in university culture, Biondi illustrates how victories in establishing Black Studies ultimately produced important intellectual innovations that have had a lasting impact on academic research and university curricula over the past 40 years. This book makes a major contribution to the current debate on Ethnic Studies, access to higher education, and opportunity for all.

The UNESCO Associated Schools Project emphasizes world community, human rights, and international understanding. This article investigates the emergence and global diffusion of the project from 1953 to 2001, estimating the influence of national, regional, and world characteristics on the likelihood of a country adopting a UNESCO school. It also addresses the effects of national linkages to the international human rights regime. The results reveal that adoption rates are positively influenced by stronger national links to the human rights regime throughout the period and that various measures of the density of global society influence adoption, particularly after the institutionalization of human rights. Finally, the results demonstrate that democratic countries and nations with more expanded educational systems tend to adopt a UNESCO school before the period of human rights institutionalization. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the literature on the global environment and the diffusion of innovations in education.

Drawing on her life's work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.

To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom--not merely reform--teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

Inserting China into the history of nineteenth-century colonialism, English Lessons explores the ways that Euroamerican imperial powers humiliated the Qing monarchy and disciplined the Qing polity in the wake of multipower invasions of China in 1860 and 1900. Focusing on the processes by which Great Britain enacted a pedagogical project that was itself a form of colonization, James L. Hevia demonstrates how British actors instructed the Manchu-Chinese elite on “proper” behavior in a world dominated by multiple imperial powers. Their aim was to “bring China low” and make it a willing participant in British strategic goals in Asia. These lessons not only transformed the Qing dynasty but ultimately contributed to its destruction.

Hevia analyzes British Foreign Office documents, diplomatic memoirs, auction house and museum records, nineteenth-century scholarly analyses of Chinese history and culture, campaign records, and photographs. He shows how Britain refigured its imperial project in China as a cultural endeavor through examinations of the circulation of military loot in Europe, the creation of an art history of “things Chinese,” the construction of a field of knowledge about China, and the Great Game rivalry between Britain, Russia, and the Qing empire in Central Asia. In so doing, he illuminates the impact of these elements on the colonial project and the creation of a national consciousness in China.

"Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools."

That's how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt.

But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures--they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together.

Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike?

Ewing's answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools--schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs--as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.