Education Equity Policy Research Articles

The Complexities of Systems Change in Creating Equity for Students With Disabilities in Urban Schools

This article explores the complexities of urban school improvement and systems change through the lens of educational equity policy initiatives. The authors situate urban schools within a critical context where contested identity politics, sociopolitical agendas, and economic stratification marginalize culturally and linguistically diverse students. The study uses the elements of a framework for systemic change and examines urban schools. Analyzing local educational change, the authors examine the interaction between structural reform, collective, community narratives about children, and their impacts on the urban schools. Along with lessons learned from school improvement and technical assistance activities, these perspectives look at how local-activity arenas respond to reform and how understanding the complexities of local practice could inform the next-generation policy initiatives. Without deep and shared understanding, the strategies employed to achieve short-term improvements will circumvent work on the changes required to shift students from the margins while simultaneously changing the mainstream conditions.

Where to in gender policy in education after recuperative masculinity politics?

Situated within a pro-feminist perspective, this paper analyses the backlash against specific policies for girls in Australian schooling. It contextualizes this backlash by considering the effects of globalization, masculinity politics of various types and media representations of a 'gender war'. Feminist responses to this situation are also considered, as well as what 'success' in schooling is taken to mean. These responses to the current policy moment stretch from those who underplay to those who overplay the success of girls in schooling. The latter stance, however, differs substantially from that of recuperative masculinists in that this feminist response recognizes the career disadvantages and the burden of the double shift of paid and domestic work still experienced by many women. The paper then analyses two political interventions in the debate: a research report to the federal government and a House of Representatives' Inquiry into the Education of Boys. Finally, the paper suggests some possible ays ahead for new gender equity policies in education with specific reference to considerations of socialcl ass, difference and the achievement of a more gender equal society. These considerations are set against the current restructuring of educationalsystems, schools and policy approaches: the move from a policy active state to arguably a need for policy active schools working towards a re-articulated conception of gender equity.