William New

Anti-Immigrant Legislation, Social Justice, and the Right to Equal Educational Opportunity

In the debates over policies seeking to exclude illegal immigrant youth from public education, complex issues related to the human and legal rights of this group have often been reduced to cost-benefit analyses, to partisan polemics about multiculturalism and national identity, and to campaign posturing about tax burdens and crime. This article presents a contextual analysis of such policies and the related legal standards, with a focus on social justice and equality issues that are raised by the exclusion of any distinct group of children from educational opportunity. Our main thesis is that every individuals interest in meaningful public education is fundamental, in a constitutional sense, and that this interest does not depend on citizenship or economic status. We begin with an analysis of Californias Proposition 187 and related Supreme Court decisions, most notably Plyler v. Doe (1982) and San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973), and move to connections with school finance litigation. We continue with an appraisal of the potential of current federal and state case law to address issues of justice that legislation such as Proposition 187 might raise in the future. Finally, we present an argument for the strengthening of Fourteenth Amendment protections in the domain of education and give special attention to the formulations o f Justice Thurgood Marshall in several pertinent cases.

Constructing an Authentic Self: The Challenges and Promise of African-Centered Pedagogy.

Abstract African‐centered pedagogy aims to cultivate a positive and productive culturally based identity for Black children, and African‐centered schools endeavor to supply that cultural base, placing the history, culture, and life experiences of individuals of African descent at the center of everything that they do. Our study examines the historical contexts in which African‐centered education has emerged and the justification for racially separate schooling. The article’s major contribution is its examination of whether African‐centered schools prepare Black children to participate in a democratic society and whether the construction of an essentialist racial identity might compromise their mission and success. We conclude that African‐centered schools provide many of the same strengths found in other forms of community‐based education but that they must continue to wrestle with essentialist notions of Black identity on which its discourse is built.

Solving the ‘gypsy problem’: D.H. and others v. the Czech Republic

The history of Roma participation in European education is dismal, a history of violence and erasure. As the European Union (EU) expands, garnering to itself Europe’s 8–10 million Roma, the “Gypsy problem” becomes increasingly important, bearing symbolically, and in real social and economic terms, on EU promises of democratic governance and equal opportunity. Until the Soviet period, the formal schooling of Roma children was rarely part of anyone’s conversation (Crowe 1996), but in the “New Europe,” bound by a commitment to inclusion, this historical state of affairs is ending, however slowly and however unwelcome. Since the end of Soviet-style socialism, eliminating discrimination against Roma students has been the goal of the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC), a transnational nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in Budapest, Hungary. The ERRC (1999) has targeted the two-track schooling system created during the communist era, in which Roma children were typically assigned from an early age to segregated “remedial schools.” Enrollment in these schools effectively precluded the possibility of high school graduation, let alone attendance at university, and participation in the “knowledge society.” 1 In a 2007, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared this two-track system of schooling to be a violation of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (hereafter, the European Convention on Human Rights; Council of Europe 1950). 2 Yet court rulings by themselves do not produce social conditions in which the rights of historically marginalized groups are enjoyed or respected, especially in schools. Roma students are entering an educational space in which longstanding resistance to their full inclusion remains, but where legal and other formal mechanisms for inclusion are in effect. While dismantling systems of de jure segregation is important, the process may reveal a new set of structural 1 Student achievement in the Czech education system is generally very high, with adult literacy and high school graduation rates approaching 100 percent and student scores in math and problem solving among the highest in the world (Wo ¨smann et al. 2007). The Czech Republic has been successful in producing highly skilled, multilingual knowledge workers, but exclusion from educational opportunity has tended to translate into poor employment prospects and low social status. 2 D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic, Grand Chamber, 7325/00 (ECHR, 2007).

Is the liberal defense of public schools a fantasy

ABSTRACT In this paper, we offer a Leftist critique of standard liberal defenses of the public school. We suggest that the standard arguments employed by mainstream liberal defenders of the public school are generally inadequate because they fail to provide a credible representation of their historical object, let alone effective remedies to our current problems. Indeed, many of these narratives, in our view, are grounded in fantasies about what public schools, or teaching and learning, are or could be, as much as they are grounded in the historical realities of public schools or the realities of so-called privatization. We speculate whether the self-identification of the proponents of this cause as ‘progressive’ is not part of this ideological construction and if the underlying political agenda is not in fact more conservative.

Sampanis v. Greece: Discrimination, Disrespect, and Romani Identity on the EU Frontier

This article examines Greek Romani identity from an exogenous viewpoint focused not on who Romani people think and feel they are, but on what others make of them, through official discourse, political action, and educational policy. This article combines a normative argument about social justice as recognition (Axel Honneth) with an empirical case study of the confrontation of a diasporic group (Pontic Greeks from the former Soviet Union) with Romani parents and children at the doorstep of a Greek school. This was the occasion for a European Court of Human Rights decision involving various nongovernmental organizations and Greek government ministries. This article argues that the dynamic interplay between official and unofficial actors in securing access of Greek–Roma children to schooling has the effect, however unintended, of framing rather narrow possibilities for the development of a positive Roma identity.

Best practices: intercultural integration of Arabic refugees in Berlin

Abstract The paper presents the work of a Berlin-based NGO (ANE) in Germany, which works with migrants and Arab refugees. The organisation has a strong record publishing a Parents Newsletter and conducting family counselling for migrants and refugees in Berlin. One of the major activities of the organisation in 2016 was an international conference with different German NGOs working with refugees. The conference was dedicated to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and developmental traumatic stress disorder (DTSD) of refugee children.

Peace education with refugees: case studies

Abstract The authors suggest the possibility of using concepts and practices drawn from peace education to assist in the treatment and education of refugees suffering from post-traumatic stress. They introduce four basic principles of peace education, which permit students/clients to work through memory and present conflicts, and calls on therapists/teachers to be flexible in their approaches. Three case studies are offered: Bosnian youth in a community center in Chicago, adult male Bosnian refugees in Berlin participating in a social integration project and recently arrived Syrian and Afghani youth living in a transitional setting in Leipzig. There is potential for work undertaken with refugees using principles of peace education to resolve ongoing internal conflicts, while helping to prevent the creation of new social conflicts in the process of integration.

Learning who they ‘really’ are: from stigmatization to opportunities to learn in Greek Romani education

This chapter explores the learning and life experiences of a vulnerable minority group—the Rom of Greece—in the context of an historical, multidimensional theory of stigmatization. Despite extensive public attention, legal decisions at every level, and the formation of countless working groups and commissions, most Rom across the EU remain mired in poverty and prejudice, a conspicuous component of which is school segregation. The Rom entered Europe through Greece and have lived there for a millennium, always at the margins of society. We examine two cases of social and school exclusion in Greece, and two cases of relative social and educational success, with the purpose of highlighting the difficulties involved in undoing an enduring ethnic stigma. Recent research on the structure and processes of stigmatization provide a framework for understanding how low social status, and poor treatment, of stigmatized populations is maintained and legitimated. The persistent experience of stigma limits opportunities, in often-irreversible social, psychological fashion, for young Rom to learn and prosper.

En-gendering Democracy: A Study of Online Academic Discourse.

Abstract In this article, gendered communication in computer-mediated conferences used as part of two education classes at a small liberal arts college is discussed. The authors maintain that attempts to create democratic classrooms are undermined by the conventional gender-marked dynamics of face-to-face dialogue, but that these dynamics show potential for being transformed in some positive ways when the dialogues move to a virtual space. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of Bourdieu and postmodern feminisms, critical discourse analysis is used to examine two extended online conversations in which issues and performances of gender were central. It was observed that sometimes in their online interactions students replicated familiar patterns of face-to-face gender interaction, but at other times they engaged in markedly different kinds of communication in which conventional patterns were disrupted. The authors conclude by seeking to understand the relationships between those aspects of the observed conversations that reproduced conventional gender dynamics and positions, and those that appeared more transformative and liberatory

MOTHER TONGUE OF ROMA CHILDREN FROM SPECIAL SCHOOLS

The article presents research demonstrating that Roma children placed in special schools for ‘defective’ children in post-communist countries suffer not from learning disabilities or mental retardation, but from the tendency of such schools to misclassify minority students on the basis of their language knowledge. The research was done with Roma children from Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Slovakia. Results from data suggest that Roma children, with appropriate bilingual educational methods, can achieve proficiency in both Romani and official school languages. The children in the study (all together 111) - pupil in the first grade from Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Slovakia, are tested with language comprehension test translated to national languages of the countries and to the Romani dialects spoken by the children in the respected countries. The testing was done in the school environment with each child separately (the first week in Romani and the second week in the official language). The results show that the children perform the test better in the official languages of the countries. The Bulgarian children show best results in both languages, the children from Slovakia know better Slovak, but they also have good knowledge in Romani and the children from Czech Republic show good results in Czech but very low results in Romani. The study shows that the system for selecting the minority children to special schools in those countries should be changed. In Czech Republic and in Slovakia still the Roma children are tested with culturally inappropriate tests only in the official language of the children. There is no testing in their mother tongue. The knowledge of the children in their mother tongue is not considered important.