Policy Entrepreneur And The Development Of Multi Ethnic Education Policies

This fascinating case study, first published in 1990, of how policies work out in a real school setting is placed in the context of the wider debate about multi-cultural, anti-racist education. This book also makes suggestions for the shaping of future policy. This book should be of interest to lecturers and students of education and sociology.

Multicultural education is a major concern throughout the world. In the UK many local education authorities have implemented curricula which stress the multicultural nature of the world and which pay some attention to the cultural tradition of minority groups. This book argues that this approach is inadequate. It reviews education policies from the 1960s to the mid 1980s and argues that the playing down of racism in education and avoidance of any clear policy was in fact misguided and has not resulted in equality of opportunity for all students, as was hoped. The authors argue instead that clear policies to counter racism should be formulated and should be linked to more broadly conceived equal opportunity programmes - in short, that these policies cannot be effective if they fail to consider also inequalities of gender and class.

This fascinating case study, first published in 1990, of how policies work out in a real school setting is placed in the context of the wider debate about multi-cultural, anti-racist education. This book also makes suggestions for the shaping of future policy. This book should be of interest to lecturers and students of education and sociology.

This book offers a fascinating yet disturbing account of the significance of racism in the lives of five and six year old children, drawing upon data from an in-depth study of an inner-city, multi-ethnic primary school and its surrounding community. It represents one of the only detailed studies to give primacy to the voices of the young children themselves - giving them the space to articulate their own experiences and concerns. Together with detailed observation of the children in the school and local community, it provides an important account of how and why they draw upon discourses on race in the development of their gender identities. The book graphically highlights the understanding that these children have of issues of race, gender and sexuality and the active role they play in using and reworking this knowledge to make sense of their experiences.

The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty year struggle by parents and members of the Black community in Toronto to introduce an Africentric Alternative School (AAS) with Black-focused curricula. It brings together a seemingly disparate series of events that emerged from equity and multicultural narratives about the establishment of the school – violence, anti-racism and race-based statistics, policy entrepreneurs, and the re-birth of alternative schools in Toronto - to illustrate how these events ostensibly functioned through neoliberal choice mechanisms and practices. Gulson and Webb show how school choice can represent and manifest the hopes and fears, contestations and settlements of contemporary racial biopolitics of education in multicultural cities.

It is becoming increasingly clear that members of a host nation as well as newcomers have to learn what it means to live democratically in a multi-ethnic world and to accept diversity without fear or rancor. This volume, a result of a conference sponsored by the Spencer Foundation, asks a question of increasing significance in view of post World War II immigration patterns and the spread of democratic forms of government: "What can educational researchers and practitioners do to prepare our youth for cooperative, constructive living in a democracy?" This book illustrates how six post-industrial nations -- Canada, Germany, Israel, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- have met or failed to meet this challenge.