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In recent decades, various perspectives on how education policymaking is transnationally influenced have gained currency, as discussed in Chap. 1. However, for my analysis of the policy formation and global trajectory of the Education with Community Participation (EDUCO) program, I draw on critical international political economy. In this chapter, in addition to explaining this theoretical perspective, I also elaborate on the particular forms of influence to which I will be attentive in my analysis of the processes through which EDUCO was created and then went global. These forms of influence are derived from the work of Dale (J Educ Pol 14(1):1–17, 1999) and Samoff (Foreign aid to education: Managing global transfers and exchanges. In L. Chishom & G. Steiner-Khamsi (Eds.), South-south cooperation in education and development (pp. 123–156). New York: Teachers College Press, 2009) and relate to mechanisms and pathways that impact national education policymaking.

Chapter Six, “Consequences for Minorities,” investigates the significance of the finding that student achievement can be raised efficiently throughout the K-12 years by individualizing task difficulty and supplying rapid performance feedback. Chapter Six draws upon data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), a nationally-representative sample of eighth-grade students who were followed for 12 years, to investigate the predicted results for racial minorities of implementing a system that raises student achievement over the K-12 years by one standard deviation. The results indicate very large predicted impacts on key educational outcomes. The results predict that the number of black and Hispanic students who attain baccalaureate degrees would double.

This chapter examines the scientific achievements of scholars and researchers in Iran in terms of the number and growth of publication of research papers in the international English-language journals. The chapter covers the debates among Iranian experts on the reason for such a high position and explores the mismatch between advances in scientific output and the inadequate technological development in the country. The chapter supports the view that while the education and science policies of Iran have been very successful, the rise in scientific achievements, however, has not led to technological learning in the industries. However, the national education system has been continually supplying well-trained human resources to industries in Iran and, through the brain drain, to the rest of the world.

The census of Jewish academics ordered by the minister of national education Bottai, in a circular of August 9, 1938, was quite simple to carry out for tenured professors who were all state employees. But the more numerous and lower-status personnel were mainly dependent on the local budget of that university where they worked on a part-time or temporary basis, even for a decade or more: assistenti ordinari and straordinari (the latter sounds higher but is not), aiuti and incaricati (adjunct professors and instructors, temporary lecturers), comandati (on leave from their full position in a high school), or assistenti volontari (mainly unpaid assistants). Scholars who had passed a concorso to obtain the university teaching qualification of liberi docenti were formally attached to a university only if they really taught there on a temporary basis, which was the minority of the cases. Yet most did take part actively in research and teaching in order to keep their title.1

It is tempting and even useful to imagine stable camps in a warlike contest over common interests in school reform, and it is an ingrained national tradition to portray meaningful struggle between camps, with Jimmy Stewart or Sidney Poitier playing the good guy in the movie version. Web 2.0 activism, a type of critical literacy, challenges that view as teachers and parents, long positioned in the backseat in national education reform, are increasingly able to drive, organize, and disagree with self-selected protagonists of positive change. In this chapter, we examine the connections among Critical Digital Literacies (CDL) and the struggle over what is “common” among stakeholders in American education.

From the end of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, national education systems, where the State played an essential role, consolidated. Within a “state-centric” logic, centralized and bureaucratic education systems were developed amid a technical expertise environment providing little participation to citizens in the decision-making process. This peculiar organizational design established autocracy and limited the features of citizen participation that later on became naturalized.

It was a rather momentous call to action when James McCosh proclaimed that the “grand educational want of America at this present time is a judiciously scattered body of secondary schools.” McCosh, president of what would become Princeton University, declared at the 1873 annual meeting of the National Education Association (NEA) that these schools were needed “to carry on our brighter youths from what has been so well commenced in the primary schools, and may be so well completed in the better colleges.” A charismatic Scotsman who loved a vibrant debate, McCosh was one of the first educators at the national level to call for educational reform and for a stronger set of secondary schools closely articulated with higher education: How are our young men to mount from the lower to the higher platform? Every one has heard of the man who built a fine house, of two stories, each large and commodious, but who neglected to put a stair between. It appears to me that there has been a like mistake committed in most of the states of the Union. We need a set of intermediate schools to enable the abler youths of America to take advantage of the education provided in the colleges.1 His call galvanized his fellow delegates. They formed a committee to review McCosh’s comments and propose ways to build the missing staircase.

Today’s health practices constitute the individual in a new way. In the early decades of the 1800s, the health of the individual emerged as a social tool for ordering the household and society. Today, the healthy individual is conceptualized as an autonomous, active, actor who is no longer connected to the social order as he was in the previous centuries. We live in a time when schools are paying increasing attention to accountability, standards, and “best practices” as the solution to poor schooling outcomes. An underlying presumption of these initiatives is that all individuals can be assessed uniformly, using the same standards for all. This presumption can be read in the recent U.S. Department of Education (2002) legislation or in national education standards. Along with these legislative initiatives, school administrators and teachers have been encouraged to agree to and put into practice universalizing standards of youth and education for active citizenry.

We were walking down the stairs towards the cafeteria for lunch with Colonel Yilmaz, when he turned to me and said, “you know, there are only two ministries that have the title ‘national’ before them: National Education and National Defense. That in itself speaks to the significance of the National Security course.” He said this with great pride and looked at me to see my reaction. I affirmed that this was indeed an interesting relationship between the two ministries. In many ways, this relationship marked him as a person, as well. He was not only a commander, but also a teacher. For years, he had been teaching the high school course, National Security Knowledge, in the schools near his command posts.

During one sweltering July afternoon in New Orleans, thousands of delegates attending the 1988 National Education Association (NEA) Representative Assembly braced for fireworks as the speaker introduced a much-anticipated and highly controversial resolution. If passed, Resolution C-11 would commit the vast resources of the two-million member association to supporting sensitive counseling for lesbian, gay, and bisexual students. In contrast with then-pervasive school counseling practices that emphasized becoming heterosexual and gender-conforming, C-11 would support programs that helped lesbian, gay, and bisexual students accept and adjust to their sexual orientation. During representative assemblies in the early 1980s, NEA members had weighed similarly contentious resolutions concerning newly emerging issues related to AIDS, such as mandatory testing and the right of AIDS-and HIV-positive students and staff to remain in schools. Before AIDS, however, discussion of issues related to sexual orientation rarely reached floor debate of these annual meetings (National Education Association 1986, 332–341; 1987, 212–221). Clearly, the pandemic had provoked normally reticent delegates to confront sexual orientation squarely.

In a speech given at the First Algerian National Colloquium on Culture, M. Lacheraf, a Maghrebi historian and former minister of national education, addressed the question of minimal requirements for the development of a Maghrebi culture, asking the following question: “At what level already or yet to be reached, does a national culture cease to be mere entertainment, and become as basic as the bread one eats and the air one breathes?” In the context of postcolonial Maghreb, it is clear that this kind of “culture,” as M. Lacheraf realized, was first of all a goal “to be attained.” That is why in his speech he subordinated this question and the answer it might receive to a much more radical one. He wrote: “To search for an answer to this … is once more to ask ourselves if a given terrain can usefully accommodate a culture that is also given; and whether such an operation does not necessitate that this terrain, that is to say, the mass of people, should first of all be in a position to respond, both to the cultural needs which fuel them and to the demands made on them by a small group of their fellows who are better equipped to satisfy these needs?”

Charl Ormond Williams began her career in education by working her way through the ranks in the rural schools of West Tennessee, from teacher to principal to normal school instructor to county superintendent. Moving, then, from the local to the national stage, Williams served as a notable leader of the cause of women teachers in the National Education Association (NEA) for over a quarter of a century. Williams was neither the founder of a particularly notable progressive school nor was she identified with pedagogical innovation that commonly has been or is referred to as progressive. Yet, her work as a successful, change-oriented rural school teacher and administrator prior to coming to the NEA, her long career as a prominent staff member of the NEA, her links to various women’s groups in pursuit of her NEA activities, her defense of public education as a cornerstone of American democracy, her political savvy and experience as both a lifelong Democrat from the South and a nonpartisan advocate of NEA causes, and her constant devotion to the cause of women as teachers and administrators in the public schools all mark her as a worthy candidate for inclusion in a volume on “founding mothers.”1

A National Education Association survey1 found that approximately nine out of ten teachers in America are white, confirming numerous reports in recent years documenting the decreasing number of minority teachers in American public schools.2 Of the remaining 10 percent, black teachers represent less than 7 percent, and Asian and others less than 3. At the same time, students of color comprise 30 percent of the students nationally and 76 percent of the students in Americas 20 central cities.3 It is widely expected that this number will increase well into the next century.4 One clear implication of these statistics is that children of color are very likely to be taught by white teachers. This has particular relevance for black children for whom, traditionally, black teachers have figured prominently in their development beyond the classroom, often serving as role models, community leaders, activists, and substitute mothers.5 To what extent this important teacher-student relationship changes when the teacher is white is a question that in light of current and projected demographics cannot be ignored. How and when is it effective? How does it compare to that of black teacher-black students? The problem is exacerbated by the fact that discussion of race as a determinant in children’s personal and academic success is still an emotionally charged and often misunderstood issue that is an impediment to effective teache education and teaching across racial lines.6

Ella Flagg Young stands as a towering figure in the history of American public schooling. She caught the national eye in 1909 when the contentious Chicago School Board selected her to be superintendent, making her the first women to hold such a position in a large urban school system. She also became the most powerful and best-paid woman executive in the country. A year later, newly enfranchised women teachers elected her president of the National Education Association (NEA), a change that shocked the established power structure of the organization and created permanent meaningful places at the table for women members. Earlier in her career, Young joined the faculty of the newly established University of Chicago, quickly becoming an influential professor who was widely sought by students, many of whom also taught in Chicago schools. At the University of Chicago she worked alongside John Dewey, earning his deepest respect and helping him clarify some of his most enduring ideas about democracy in education. Young provided long-standing leadership to the schools of the entire state by serving on the Illinois State Board of Education for around 20 years before becoming its president in 1910. She maintained an active scholarly agenda in her later years. She edited a series of monographs for the University of Chicago Press and also edited two important educational journals, The Elementary School Teacher and The Educational Bi-Monthly, each of which stimulated rich discussion among teachers and scholars alike. As principal of the Chicago Normal School, she pioneered a number of rigorous, socially progressive, and intellectually demanding methods for preparing teachers to work in nearby schools. In addition to these strenuous activities, she also assumed substantial leadership in a variety of social, political, and professional organizations throughout her adulthood. Taken together, Young’s contributions to public schooling are remarkable, both for their broad extent and their depth.