The article critiques the logic guiding the achievement gap. The author argues that most academic uses of the construct props up what he terms "white-superiority ideology," thus reinforcing differences in achievement between whites and nonwhites. The article questions whether or not the achievement gap is real or, better yet, useful.

In a bad decision for public education, a federal judge in California ruled that school authorities could not discipline a student for posting a YouTube video that described a classmate as a slut.

The nation’s public libraries function as a safety net for children living in high poverty areas by granting them equal access to the same resources and knowledge that their more advantaged peers have. Children in low-income neighborhoods typically have access to fewer books and fewer computers than do children from middle-class neighborhoods. The result of unequal access to information is a steadily growing knowledge gap between low- and middle-income children. Tough economic times threaten to close many libraries, adding to the already insurmountable odds low-income children have in catching up with their wealthier peers.

Most countries that have low youth unemployment and transition young people quickly and successfully into a wide range of careers that meet labor market needs and have decent salaries do not have “college for all” policies as in the USA. Instead, they head most young people into VET with the option of moving into postsecondary professional education. They do so using a mix of work and schooling in a liberal arts context.

The vibrant language and culture of U.S. Latinos should be an integral part of elementary, middle- and high-school curricula. Knowledge of this important culture will enrich and empower all students, giving them tools to negotiate changing U.S. society as adults.

Three years ago, the Rosebud Reservation was rocked by the suicides of two of their own: a nineteen-year old varsity athlete and a thirteen year old straight A student. This brought the total number of suicides for 2007 to 144, a rate three times the national average. In the Great Plains, where Rosebud is located, the suicide rate is an alarming ten times the national average. This commentary offers one historic explanation for the despair still shaping Indian communities: the forced "civilizing" of natives through missionary schools founded in the 19th and early 20th centuries on reservations like Rosebud.

Today, students who are unhappy with school authorities can avail themselves of the internet and express their disrespect to the entire planet. More and more frequently, alienated students attack school administrators on personal web sites, blogs, e-mail communications, or social networking web sites. Often they use vulgar language or worse. Sometimes, in an adolescent effort to be funny, they defame school administrators with allegations of sexual misconduct.

This is a commentary about the role of artists in creating a counter-narrative that extends written text about the treatment of Mexican immigrants in Arizona and other places throughout the U.S.

We will argue in this commentary that epidemiology and education research as fields should engage in greater dialogue about pressing matters involving social disparities. Two questions will frame this commentary. What is epidemiology? How might this field inform our understanding of educational disparities?

This commentary explores how conceptions of "normal" have been constructed around issues of race, language, and ability. By combining three theoretical frameworks, Critical Race Theory, Cultural Historical Activity Theory, and Disability Studies, the authors attempt to deconstruct, reconstruct, and transcend the perceived borders of normal.

This commentary argues that the Obama administration's Race to The Top is based on false premises, specious Science, and a general disregard for who students and teachers are and how they actually engage in learning in schools. Instead, the author proposes a re-defining of educator quality through an anthropological lens, a re-discovering of the work of Geertz (1983), and an educational pursuit of understanding rather than a mythical "top."

The authors present the notion of [dis]ableing as way of making visible the presence and limiting effects of ability-normative thinking. Ability-normative thinking, they argue, reflects the dominant, taken-for-granted assumption that human beings have similar physical, emotional, and psychological resources and capacities, that everyone uses these capacities to engage in the world in a similar manner, and that human experience and understanding of a given phenomenon is similar. In this commentary they briefly introduce [dis]ableing and demonstrate its usefulness in uncovering the influences of ability-normative thinking through a snapshot analysis of discourses pertaining to the Race to the Top.

Cyber charter schools are becoming a rapidly mainstream part of K-12 public education. As these online schools expand, they engender much controversy amongst stakeholders. This commentary outlines the coming debates surrounding K-12 cyber schools and calls for deliberate and thoughtful policymaking to better govern these innovative organizations.

Colleges and universities can probably do more to make their campuses safer in light of the tragedies at the University of Alabama and Virginia Tech University. Absent reckless conduct, however, we should not hold colleges and universities responsible for violent acts committed by disturbed faculty members or students.

In O'Neal v. Falcon, a college student sued her instructor after he refused her request to give a speech on abortion in an undergraduate communications class.

Along with many others, I believe that a new structure for formal education is needed for our nation's graduates to compete in the 21st century knowledge-based global economy. The one-room rural schoolhouse, emblematic of agricultural America, was replaced a century ago with the industrial-era schools we still have today. A comparable shift is necessary now; valiant attempts to keep the obsolete structure of today's schools (and colleges), but change people, policies, and practices are falling well short of delivering high quality educational outcomes for all our students. The U.S. Department of Education's draft 2010 National Educational Technology Plan provides a pathway towards developing a 21st century model of formal education to replace industrial-era schooling. Schools as custodial institutions are a starting point for considering the work of teaching, but a distributed model of human and technical infrastructure encompasses a wider context of formal learning outside of classrooms that includes parents, museum and library staff, community members, and older peers as educators who collaborate with teachers in achieving equity and excellence. The many affordances of modern technology can now support both a broader suite of roles involving "teaching" and a range of educational delivery systems beyond the walls of the school.

This commentary examines recent utopian claims for transforming public schools through technology and the current Obama administration reform agenda.

The measurement of student achievement can be a useful determinant of educational policy and reform. But not if it is folded into a scheme of high stakes accountability that promotes aggressive individualism in America’s schools. Reformers have yet to face up to the fact that the complexity of their task has far more to do with not destroying the very features that make education an uplifting, noble endeavor than it has to do with perfecting their devices for measuring and judging individual performance.

This commentary argues that the focus on admissions decisions ignores a potentially more powerful source of campus diversity, namely application behavior.

Most people believe that student loans are almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, but two recent bankruptcy-court decisions may be a sign that bankruptcy judges are growing more sympathetic towards overwhelmed student-loan debtors.

The author has spend the last six years identifying and visiting high performing schools with significant populations of children living in poverty and children of color. What she has found is that although teachers in these schools work hard, they find their work invigorating because they are successful. And they are successful because their schools are organized with care to ensure that they do everything right, from discipline to curriculum.

With the nation hunkered down for what looks to be lengthy bad times, American public schools, grappling with the most severe budget cuts in more than three decades, are reducing educational services to millions of children.

Professors of social justice education courses report that some students resist the course content. This resistance has, in the past, been attributed to self-serving cognition on the part of students. I argue that their resistance may have a moral component.

We have a golden opportunity to fix a big problem with our country’s approach to education. While Obama’s advisors formulate new standards with which the government will measure schools, we have a chance to convince him that the standards should be based on two things: research about children, and a clear sense of what it is we really want children to get out of school (besides a good test score).

A mother of a student suicide victim accuses a Catholic college of deliberate indifference to her daughter's gang rape.