Research on Black women superintendents has focused largely on their racial and gendered identities and the challenges associated with negotiating the politics of race and gender while leading complex school systems. Regarding the underrepresentation of Black female superintendents, an examination of Black women’s experiences of preparing for, pursuing, attaining, and serving in the superintendency may provide insights regarding their unique ways of knowing and, leading that, inform their leadership praxis. Informed by research on K-12 school superintendency, race and gender in education leadership, and the lived experiences and knowledge claims of Black women superintendents, important implications for future research on the superintendency will be hold. There exists a small but growing body of scholarly research on Black women education leaders, even less on the Black woman school superintendent, who remains largely underrepresented in education leadership research and the field. Although key studies have played an important role in establishing historical records documenting the service and contributions of Black women educational leaders in the United States, the bulk of the research on Black women superintendents can be found in dissertation studies grounded largely in the works of Black women education leadership scholars and practitioners. As a growing number of aspiring and practicing leaders who identify as Black women enter graduate-level leadership preparation programs and join the ranks of educational administration, questions concerning race and gender in leadership are almost always present as the theories presented in leadership preparation programs often conflict with or represent set of perspectives, realities, and strategies that may not align with those experienced by leaders who identify as Black women. For these reasons, their leadership perspectives, epistemologies, and contributions are essential to our understanding of the superintendency and field of educational leadership.
Article
Black Women Superintendents
Sonya Douglass Horsford, Dessynie D. Edwards, and Judy A. Alston
Article
Chinese Education in Malaysia
Ming Chee Ang
Despite the fact that Mandarin is not accorded official language status in Malaysia, and that ethnic Chinese communities accounted for less than 30% of the country’s overall population, Malaysia is the only country outside China and Taiwan with a comprehensive and complete Chinese education system. It is also the only country in Southeast Asia that has perpetuated the Chinese education system established during the colonial era.
The prolonged endurance of the Chinese education system in Malaysia is the result of many factors: heavy brokerage and lobbying efforts by ethnic Chinese political leaders; incorporation of vernacular schools into the Malay-dominated national education system in the backdrop of the Malayan nation formation stage; social mobilization of the Chinese education movement in Malaysia; and the increasing significance of Mandarin proficiency in the world.
In particular, the assimilation policies for nation building by the Malay-dominated regime have threatened the cultural distinctiveness of the Chinese-speaking communities. Resistance from the Chinese speaking minorities is manifested through their support of the Chinese schools. Moreover, the elimination of English schools during the 1970s has unintentionally favored the Chinese primary schools. Despite their standing at that time as the “second-best” option after the English school, Chinese schools that offered the benefit of trilingual education, stricter discipline, and more competitive academic performance enjoyed an accelerated boost in student enrollments. More importantly, many parents who do not speak Chinese began to appreciate the quality of Chinese schools, and the enrollment of non-ethnic Chinese students has continued to rise ever since.
Above all, China’s rapid economic ascendancy and growing political influence since the 1990s has enhanced the importance of Mandarin as a global language. This has added value to the importance of Chinese schools as language and cultural learning institutions for Malaysian. Such opportunity has enabled the Chinese school model to become one of the most successful and inclusive educational institutions for multicultural Malaysians.
Article
Critical Race Theory and STEM Education
Terrell R. Morton
Critical race theory (CRT) is a framework that attends to the prevalence, permanence, and impact of racism embedded within and manifested through the policies, practices, norms, and expectations of U.S. social institutions and how those concepts have differentially impacted the lived experiences of Black and Brown individuals. CRT bore out of the legal studies—complemented by philosophical and sociological fields—and has since been applied to a multitude of disciplines including education. Composed of several tenets or principles, CRT approaches to research, scholarship, and praxis take a structural, systematic, or systemic perspective rather than an individual or isolated perspective. CRT provides scholars and practitioners the ability to acknowledge and challenge structural racism and intersectional forms of oppression as foundational to the perceived and experienced inequities outlined by various constituents. In providing such a perspective, CRT facilitates the opportunity for future ideologies that promote radical and transformative change to systems and structures that perpetuate racial and intersectional-based oppression. STEM education—representing the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics from inter- and intradisciplinary perspectives—constitutes the norms, ideologies, beliefs, and practices hallmarked by and within these fields, examined both separately as individual disciplines (e.g., science) and collectively (i.e., STEM). These concepts comprise what is noted as the culture of STEM. Scholarship on STEM education, broadly conceived, discusses the influence and impact of STEM culture across P–20+ education on access, engagement, teaching, and learning. These components are noted through examining student experiences; teachers’ (faculty) engagement, pedagogy, and practice; leadership and administration’s implementation of the aforementioned structures; and the creation and reinforcement of policies that regulate STEM culture. Critical race theoretical approaches to STEM education thus critique how the culture of STEM differentially addresses the needs and desires of various racially minoritized communities in and through STEM disciplines. These critiques are based on the fact that the power to disenfranchise individuals is facilitated by the culture of whiteness embedded within STEM culture, a perspective that is codified and protected by society to favor and privilege White people. CRT in STEM education research tackles the influence and impact of racism and intersectional oppression on racially minoritized individuals in and through STEM by revealing the manifestation and implications of racism and intersectional oppression on racially minoritized individuals’ STEM interactions. CRT in STEM also provides opportunities to reclaim and create space that more appropriately serves racially minoritized individuals through the use of counterstories that center the lived experience of said individuals at the crux of epistemological and ontological understandings, as well as the formation of policies, programs, and other actions. Such conceptions strive to challenge stakeholders within STEM to alter their individual and collective beliefs and perspectives of how and why race is a contending factor for access, engagement, and learning in STEM. These conceptions also strive to challenge stakeholders within STEM to reconfigure STEM structures to redress race-based inequity and oppression.
Article
Dynamics in Education Politics and the Finnish PISA Miracle
Hannu Simola, Jaakko Kauko, Janne Varjo, Mira Kalalahti, and Fritjof Sahlström
The international debate on Finnish educational “success” had made relevant a cultural and historical analysis of Finnish education, with a focus on the effects of the ongoing preoccupation with the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results on basic education. Such international comparisons demand a strong theoretical approach, in part because the contrastive analysis of empirical “facts” and “realities” requires that they be situated in relation to their local and, in this case, national systems and contexts. It may be assumed that the quantitative indicators agreed on in intergovernmental negotiations between senior bureaucrats do indeed provide valid comparisons of education systems, as is the conventional wisdom in the field of economics. Nevertheless, these remain value-loaded collections of indicators of development that offer at best parallel lines of comparative analysis. The Finnish case argues for strong theory-based conceptualizations as the basis for, first, complex comparison and, second, shared models of policy action and intervention.
The comparative education field faces four interlinked challenges. First, there is a lack of theory building and development in the field, where politically and ideologically motivated investigative large-scale assessment practices are defining the state of the art. Second, the focus of the studies tends to be on empirically measurable end products instead of documented processes, which makes it possible to generate competitive rankings but reveals little about specific and shared developmental processes in educational systems. Third, although complexity and contingency are widely accepted in the social world on the general level, they appear to seldom reach empirical studies; the vast majority of standard approaches still advocate simple explanatory models. Finally, and paradoxically enough, there is a form of intellectual nationalism that inhibits the conceptualization and understanding of the relationship between, for example, transnational processes and nation-states. In this regard, comparative education needs a strong and ambitious theory-based framework with the potential to incorporate sociohistorical complexity, cultural relationality, and sociological contingency. Without a strong theory-driven approach, it is hard to go beyond merely listing the similarities and differences that facilitate the rankings but blur the processes.
At the research unit for Sociology and Politics in Education (KUPOLI) at the University of Helsinki, a new conceptualization was formulated in early 2010s and an ambitious research plan, Comparative Analytics of Dynamics in Education Politics (CADEP), was launched. The thesis was that to progress beyond the state of the art and arrive at a comparative understanding of educational systems, it would be necessary to focus on dynamics, with a view to grasping the fluid and mobile nature of the subject. This heuristic starting point echoed relativistic dynamics in physics, characterized as a combination of relativistic and quantum theories to describe the relationships between the principal elements of a relativistic system and the forces acting on it. It is curious that, though on the conceptual level the dynamics of a system are constantly referred to as being among its key attributes, there has been little progress on the analytical level in the social sciences since the seminal work of Pitirim Sorokin in the 1950s. The CADEP develops conceptually the theoretical understanding of dynamics to resubmit a specific social field of education to scrutiny by analyzing the relations between the main actors and institutions and essential discursive formations and practices. It is assumed that given its connection with relations and movement, the concept of dynamics will not reduce a mobile and fluid subject of study to a stagnant and inanimate object. There are four constitutive dynamics that make the Finnish educational success story understandable. Success and failure in basic education seem to be relative, and to reflect intertwined dynamics in policymaking, governance, families’ educational strategies, and classroom cultures. The emphasis of the understanding is on the contingent, relational, and complex character of political history.
Article
Educational Attainment and Integration of Foreign Students in Spain
Sergio Andres Cabello and Joaquín Giró Miranda
Education is one of the pillars of the welfare state in Spain, and one of the main ways of reducing inequalities and, potentially, integrating members of the immigrant population. Schools serve to promote social and cultural integration of foreign students and their families. Spain, although its history as a country of immigration has been short, has been quite efficient in integrating the emigrant population, especially at school. It is important to bear in mind that schools and the school environment are the main point of encounter between families of different cultures. There were significant difficulties incorporating foreign students in schools in the first decade of this century. The importance of integration in the process of normalizing relations between immigrant families and schools has been indisputable. However, one of the main difficulties with this integration has been the poorer performance and academic achievement of foreign students in the Spanish education system. Foreign students’ performance is significantly different. For example, they achieve significantly lower grades in the different standardized tests (Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)), e.g., and higher rates of dropout, academic failure, and grade repetition. However, it is also true that these differences are significantly smaller for second-generation students born in Spain of immigrant parents. Faced with these facts, there have been numerous theoretical analyses and research projects that have tried to determine which variables affect this situation and which of them can be attributed to immigration, excluding any other socioeconomic factors.
The results and the academic attainment of foreign- and immigrant-origin students in the Spanish education system are associated with some factors attributed to immigration. One of the most important is school segregation processes and their consequences for the educational and social integration of this group. Likewise, the financial crisis that has affected public policy and the Spanish welfare system, with the resulting budget cuts in education, has conditioned compensatory measures and attention to diversity.
Article
Higher Education Equity and Justice
Ulpukka Isopahkala-Bouret
The higher education (HE) equity and social justice agenda is primarily concerned with inequalities in the participation of underrepresented groups. The main purpose of this agenda is to widen access to the social privileges that HE offers. Transnational policy agencies and national governments have advised higher education institutions (HEIs) to deploy relevant indicators and implement inclusive practices, such as financial assistance, nondiscriminatory admission mechanisms, and student guidance and counseling. HEIs have also been funded to provide outreach and widening participation programs in several countries. In the early 21st century, the conceptualization of HE equity and justice has broadened from fair access to more holistic, procedural, and intersectional approaches. Still, the lack of reliable, relevant, and feasible policy indicators and data make it a challenging objective to measure and follow up. Furthermore, research has pointed out the need for contextualized definitions of equity and justice because the specific social and cultural challenges differ from one country to another. Equity and justice manifest themselves in the broader design of national and regional HE systems. Some HE systems have stronger institutional stratification and financial barriers than others, hence restraining the fairness of access and social inclusion. The application of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory has dominated much of the research on structural constraints of HE equity and justice. An understanding of the connection between structure/agency and the cultural reproduction opens up new avenues for the development of HE equity and justice in both policy and practice.
Article
History and Social Studies Curriculum
E. Wayne Ross
Social studies education has had a turbulent history as one of the core subjects in the school curriculum. The fundamental content of the social studies curriculum – the study of human enterprise across space and time –however, has always been at the core of educational endeavors. It is generally accepted that the formal introduction of social studies to the school curriculum was instigated by the 1916 report of the National Education Association’s Committee on Social Studies, which emphasized development of citizenship values as a core aim of history and social science education. Earlier commissions of the N.E.A. and American Historical Association heavily influenced the Committee on Social Studies recommendations. The roots of the contemporary social studies curriculum, therefore, can be traced to two distinct curriculum reform efforts: the introduction of academic history into the curriculum and citizenship education. There is widespread agreement that the aim of social studies is citizenship education, that is the preparation of young people so that they possess the knowledge, skills, and values necessary for active participation in society. This apparent consensus, however, has been described as almost meaningless because social studies educators continue to be at odds over curricular content as well as the conception of what it means to be a good citizen. Since its formal introduction into the school, social studies curriculum been the subject of numerous commission and blue-ribbon panel studies, ranging from the sixteen-volume report of the American Historical Association’s Commission on Social Studies in the 1930s to the more recent movement for national curriculum standards. Separate and competing curriculum standards have been published for no less than seven areas of that are part of the social studies curriculum: United States and global history, economics, geography, civics, psychology, and social studies. Social studies curriculum is defined a lack of consensus and has been an ideological battleground with ongoing debates over its nature, purpose, and content. Historically there have been a diverse range of curricular programs that have been a prominent within social studies education at various times, including the life adjustment movement, progressive education, social reconstructionism, and nationalistic history. The debate over the nature, purpose, and content of the social studies curriculum continues today, with competing groups variously arguing for a social issues approach, the disciplinary study of history and geography, or action for social justice as the most appropriate framework for the social studies curriculum.
Article
Inclusive and Special Education in the Middle East
Hala Elhoweris and Efthymia Efthymiou
In the culturally diverse Middle Eastern Arabian world, there are incompatible ideas about and definitions of “inclusion” and “inclusive education,” which result in these terms being multifaceted and complex. The issues surrounding policies, the legislative frameworks—but also the attitudes and practices and their implications for individuals with Special Educational Needs and Disorders (SEND)—are explored in this paper, starting with some consideration of the official guidelines for providing inclusive education and how these are enacted according to the social or local conceptualizations that influence practice. Around the world, the tendency is to support special needs in mainstream classes with other children at all school levels in order to prevent marginalization, labeling, and social stigmatization. However, in the process of developing effective educational policies that benefit students with SEND in practice, it is useful to consider whether inclusion actually serves their needs. Though some progress has been reported in the social integration and inclusion of individuals with SEND, more light needs to be shed on whether, under current circumstances inclusion does indeed benefit people with special needs and disabilities. An analysis of the necessary parameters for supporting a learning environment for the benefit of all children in an inclusive mainstream class is necessary. The examination of inclusion-based practices can help to dispel the misconceptions that consistently surround the practice of educating students with disabilities in any inclusive environment. Recommendations are made for community-oriented sensitization programs and education campaigns but also school-based disability awareness programs and teacher training that could be promoted by governmental organizations, human rights bodies, and other stakeholders in the Arab world to support and empower people with disabilities.
Article
Indigenous School Education in Brazil
Roseli R. Mello, Marcondy M. de Souza, and Thaís J. Palomino
Self-determination of the original peoples of any nation, preservation of their territories, preservation of traditions, and negotiation of customs facing national cultures are central themes in the debate about and among indigenous peoples in the world. School education is directly linked to such themes as an instrument of acculturation or self-determination and emancipation. As in other countries of the globe, throughout history, what happened and is happening in Brazil is not isolated fact. Current conditions are the product of colonization processes, the development of industrial society, and more recently of globalization. Such historical processes bring struggles, confrontations, transformations, and solidarity. In the legal sphere, international conventions, declarations, and treaties have influenced more or less directly the norms and laws on the subject: from the papal bull and treaties between colonizing kingdoms, to the Declaration of Human Rights, to Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, the Brazilian indigenous issue, like that of many other countries, is also based on, supported by, or held back by actions, debates, and international interests.
But what makes the case of Brazil worthy of relevance for thinking about indigenous education? Two elements make up an answer: the specific way the governors establish relations with the original peoples, and the fact that Brazil has the greatest diversity of indigenous communities.
Article
Religious and Cultural Diversity in Spanish Education
Sergio Andrés Cabello and Joaquín Giró Miranda
Treatment of cultural and religious diversity is one of the most important debates in education, especially in societies in the first decades of the 21st century, in which globalization processes have led to increased migration. Different models exist for addressing religious and cultural diversity in compulsory education, linked to the different ways of approaching the integration of immigrant groups. The treatment of diversity, equality, and respect for fundamental rights are the axes on which most of these proposals revolve, which in the case of the religious issue acquire specific dimensions by generating a wider debate. In the Spanish case, the treatment of cultural diversity and, fundamentally, religious diversity is situated both within the framework of general conceptions and with particular elements.
The contemporary scenario of how the Spanish educational system addresses cultural and religious diversity is determined from the particular features of Spanish education and the immigration “boom” in Spain in much of the first decade of the 21st century. The evolution of legislation on diversity, the fact that education is a subject for ideological debate, and the need to face the challenge of a new social structure because of immigration, together with the importance of the Catholic Church in Spain, determine to a large extent the way this country has addressed religious diversity. The treatment of religious and cultural diversity continues to generate an important discussion in Spain, based on different theories about the topic.
Article
Mestiza Methodology as a Hybrid Research Design
Amanda Jo Cordova
Chicana feminists such as Maylei Blackwell, Cherrie Moraga, and Anna Nieto-Gómez of the 1960s Chicano Movement called for a gendered critique of racial activism mired in the stultification of Chicana leadership, ultimately galvanizing epistemology and theory grounded in a Chicana way of knowing. In particular, the introduction of a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in the 1990s to the field of education centered the reconciliation and healing of education, knowledge, and knowledge holders dehumanized by the exclusionary logics of colonialism pervasive in educational spaces. Consequently, crafting research methodologies of a Chicana hybrid nature, both locating and healing the fractured embodiment of knowledge educational actors draw upon, is critical to the groundwork of a more socially just educational system. Focused on the hybridity or the duality of knowing and the damage created by the colonial separation of such knowledge from knowledge holders, methodologies must be curated to locate and fuse back together what was torn apart. Mestiza Methodology was developed to locate the liminal space in which Chicanas collectively recount experiences leading to the separation of who they are and what they know in the academic arena as a means to recover, reclaim, and reconcile oneself to the pursuit of an education decolonized.
Article
Professional Political and Contextual Considerations of Policy Borrowing
Adam E. Nir
We live in a globalized world characterized by rapid changes. These circumstances force public educational systems to innovate and introduce new policies that may potentially enhance the quality of their educational processes and outcomes and increase the relevance of educational services that schools provide to their communities.
The complexity of educational policy setting and the constant flow of ideas and information coming from all around the world increase the attractiveness of policy plans that have been proved successful elsewhere. The tendency to learn from the positive experiences of others and use successful educational policies created in one national context in another is termed educational policy borrowing. The cross-national transfer of educational best practices which has become prevalent allows local policymakers a better understanding of their own systems of education. It may also raise the quality of educational policies and encourage the application of specific practices and ideas in local educational contexts.
Article
School Culture
Diana Gonçalves Vidal and André Paulilo
Over the past several decades, scholars have focused special attention on the relationship between schooling and culture. The first forays focused on curriculum matters, trying to understand how educational policies affected the selection of content and its dissemination in schools. More recently, the concept of school culture has emerged as a frame for researchers, thanks to its ability to problematize how teachers and pupils experience school in terms of time and space. Placing these individuals in the center of the schooling process, the concept of school culture enables scholars to create a more comprehensive analysis of what happens inside classrooms and schoolyards. This tool offers an opportunity for researchers and teachers to debate the merits of tradition and innovation in education, pay attention to material culture as a part of school practices, and consider school community as a social actor. The concept has become commonplace in the academic production in many areas, such as educational sociology, history of education, educational anthropology, philosophy of education, and educational psychology.
Article
Schooling and Equity in Israel
Yariv Feniger, Yossi Shavit, and Shir Caller
Education in Israel is compulsory and free, from the age of three to the end of secondary school (12th grade). Compulsory education culminates in matriculation examinations that serve as the main criterion for enrollment in higher education. Although Israel is geographically small, and ethnic and religious subpopulations live in close proximity to one another, they are highly segregated both residentially and in schools. The Jewish and Arab school sectors are almost completely separate. Most Arab students study in Arab state schools, where the language of instruction is Arabic and the staff are Arab. Jewish students study in state, state religious, or independent ultra-Orthodox schools. The high degree of economic inequality in Israel is reflected in educational inequality, which is the highest among the countries participating in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Inequalities between social strata are affected in part by the economic circumstances of families in early childhood. Inequality in educational achievement is particularly evident between Jews and Arabs but it is also prominent within each of these two societies. The public educational system is centralized and curricula are standardized, but religious Jewish groups enjoy considerable organizational and curricular autonomy. Arab state schools, in contrast, do not enjoy similar autonomy. Rapid expansion of higher education has contributed to a dramatic increase in graduation rates in all social categories but large gaps remain, especially along ethnoreligious lines, in graduation rates, fields of study, and quality of institutions attended.
