Integration Matters

The United States is more racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse now than at any given point in its history. Urbanization and immigration are key contributors to population growth and shifts, particularly in the southeastern part of the country. Educators are scrambling to determine how best to serve different demographics, and many families in new places are trying to adjust to unfamiliar school systems. For all concerned, this period of adjustment is marked by significant personal, curricular, and institutional development. However, one group of individuals has not maintained pace with the rest: African American males continue to lag behind their counterparts in every measured educational variable as outlined by the No Child Left Behind legislation, despite the educational, social, and economic changes of the past fifty years (since the 1954 landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision). This book - beyond providing educators, parents, and students with a critique of present day educational experiences for those who are the «other» in America, particularly the black male - conceptually integrates queer legal theory, the tenets of critical spirituality, and notions of collaborative activism to construct a blueprint for realizing academic achievement and academic success for all students.

More than 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregated schooling inherently unequal, this timely book sheds light on how and why U.S. schools are experiencing increasing segregation along racial, socioeconomic, and linguistic lines. It offers policy and programmatic alternatives for advancing equity and describes the implications for students and more broadly for the nation. The authors look at the structural and legal roots of inequity in the United States educational system and examine opportunities to support integration efforts across the educational pipeline (pre-k to higher education).

This book sheds light on the integration processes and identity patterns of Angolan, Brazilian and Eastern European communities in Portugal. It examines the privileged position that immigrant organisations hold as interlocutors between the communities they represent and various social service mechanisms operating at national and local levels. Through the collection of ethnographic data and the realisation of 110 interviews with community insiders and middlemen, culled over a year's time, Joo Sardinha provides insight into how the three groups are perceived by their respective associations and representatives. Following up on the rich data is a discussion of strategies of coping with integration and identity in the host society and reflections on Portuguese social and community services and institutions.

Adapting to European Integration describes how the political institutions in eight small member states and two non-members responded to the internal and external demands springing from the process of European integration in general and EC/EU membership in particular. The study makes a distinction between governmental/administrative adaptation, political adaptation and strategic adaptation. The chapters focus, in the first instance, on the governmental/administrative responses at the level of central government, the organisational adjustments and the changes in institutional capacity to meet the new challenges. The authors also look at the willingness of the political decision-makers to internalise the EC/EU dimension in domestic policy making and the way in which the country's own history as well as the attitude towards European integration facilitate or hinder adaptation and change.

"In this study the experience in the Netherlands with civic integration policies will be explained in a detailed and systematic way. As it stands, the Netherlands presently has one of the most encompassing and coercive civic integration policies, which is characterised by overseas civic integration testing, a general obligation to pass a civic integration exam for all foreign nationals and the existence of an elaborate sanctioning regime. Our main purpose is to understand the legitimacy of civic integration in this country, particularly through analysing its main implications and effects from a broader perspective. This perspective consists of an historical context, a framework of modern citizenship rights, and a cross border comparison of different national integration concepts. The principal issues to be addressed are the political and social arguments which lay behind the introduction of civic integration policies, and the extent to which these policies fit within academic notions of modern citizenship. In addition, the Dutch model of civic integration will be set against alternative national integration strategies as prevailing in some other immigrant receiving countries, particularly Belgium, Canada and the United States."--Publisher's description.

The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg are well-known cases of consensus politics. Decision-making in the Low Countries has been characterized by broad involvement, power sharing and making compromises. These countries were also founding member states of the European Union (EU) and its predecessors. However, the relationship between European integration and the tradition of domestic consensus politics remains unclear. In order to explore this relationship this book offers in-depth studies of a wide variety of political actors such as governments, parliaments, political parties, courts, ministries and interest groups as well as key policy issues such as the ratification of EU treaties and migration policy. The authors focus not only on Europeanization, but also analyse whether European integration may gradually undermine the fundamental characteristics of consensus politics in the Low Countries. Drawing on consociationalism and Europeanization research, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of Europeanization in these three EU member states as well as a better understanding of the varieties of consensus politics across and within these countries. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of European studies, European integration, European law, political science, European political economy and comparative politics.