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In China, a growing awareness that many areas have been left behind during an era characterized by market reform has raised concerns about the impact of community disadvantage on schooling. In this paper, I investigate whether villages exert distinct influences on student achievement. Building on these results, I explore the relationship between student achievement and resources present in the community. Results indicate that children who live in communities with higher levels of economic and social resources have higher mathematics scores, on average.

As comparativists of education are well aware, over the second half of the 20th century there was a dramatic increase in the pace of educational expansion around the world. This revolution has made the world a schooled place both in terms of enrollment rates and increased average total years in schooling. What has been particularly noticeable is the degree to which governments in all types of nations have come to see that education plays a central role in the future development of the nation's human capital, and in turn governments have become the main providers of schooling. This alone is a significant shift from anything ever seen before the 20th century. Further this remarkable expansion of education has fostered notable homogeneity of goals, aims, and basic organizational forms of elementary and secondary schooling and, more recently, higher education.

The digital technological revolution offers new ways for classrooms to operate and challenges the concept of whether brick and mortar schools should exist at all. At the same time, the changes to society as we move from a knowledge-based economy to an intelligent and innovation-based economy challenges us to reassess the purpose of education. This chapter investigates an overarching counterfactual question, “What if compulsory schooling was invented in the twenty-first century”? We used a foresight methodology, based on “anticipation,” to conceptualize possible models for a future system of compulsory schooling arising from an analysis of contemporary catalysts for remodeling. While anticipation does not predict the future, the concept is that when a current system and a model of a system interplay, they impact each other to change both the present as well as possible futures. The design principles of cities, such as Freiburg (Germany), Poundbury (England), and Christie Walk (Australia), which have been developed around the idea of ecologically sustainable and decentralized cities, are focused on approaches to living that can provide a springboard for exploring the impact of changing employment, economic, technological, and social change on future schooling models. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has opened up a new field of study to investigate neuroscience, which can inform teaching practice. Postmodern and indigenous ways of thinking provide different insights about how schooling might be reconceptualized. Alternative models of future schooling are conceptualized about (i) the role of the learner and teacher, (ii) design of a school, and (iii) the purpose of compulsory schooling. For each area of remodeling, deviations to current practices as well as paradigm shifts are framed as part of scenario building. Related questions include: how schooling might be different if it had been created today for the first time? How might it better meet the needs of contemporary society? What aspects of schooling now might be lost if it was only invented in the twenty-first century? What are possible side effects from any change ideas as part of research practice? A vital aspect of this chapter is to explore the concept of learning as a general concept versus the more specific concept of schooling. We are at the precipice of a new vision of schooling based on a counterfactual way of thinking about the future of schooling as we have known it in the West.

As Jennifer Adams notes in her paper, a number of studies within the U.S., as well as some studies in China and other low- and middle-income countries, have begun to address the ways that communities impact schooling outcomes. The potential role played by communities in local education has strengthened with the shift toward administrative and fiscal decentralization in many developed and developing countries. Often, fiscal decentralization results in a greater reliance on community financing of schooling, which, in turn, strengthens the association between where students live and the quality of educational services they receive (Bray, 1996a, 1996b).

In this chapter, I take up Smith’s (2012) conceptualization of pedagogy as “the thinking and practice of those educators who look to accompany learners; care for and about them; and bring learning to life” (np). I first make visible my thinking about parents and families which underlies my pedagogy. Here, I use Green and Christian’s (1998) notion of “accompanying” and Noddings’ (2002) notion of “caring about” to elaborate on my metaphorical understanding of the position of educators as one of walking alongside parents and family members in the education and schooling of their children. I then reflectively turn to my practice with undergraduate teacher education students to discuss what I do, in my own walking alongside, to live out a “curriculum of parents” (Pushor, 2011, 2013) with students. I use my course, Teaching and Learning in Community Education, to provide a live example of my pedagogy in practice and, finally, I reflect on my experiences within this pedagogy of working with parents and family to pull forward considerations that I feel are worthy of “deeper noticing” (Bateson, 1995).

Educational achievement gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples exist as a critical issue and a policy challenge in most countries. This chapter examines contemporary schooling issues and inequalities experienced by Canadian Indigenous students in order to further understand the challenges that impact their schooling experiences.

This chapter draws on interviews with 50 participants (26 educators and 24 parents) within four southern Ontario school boards. Of those interviewees, 20 teachers and 20 parents identify as Indigenous (mainly Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and Métis). Four non-Indigenous parent interviewees have children with Indigenous ancestry and six non-Indigenous teachers have Indigenous education as an area of specialization.

Findings suggest that Indigenous students encounter schooling challenges associated with: racial discrimination, feelings of not fitting in, and desires to blend in with the majority student population, as well as inequalities in Indigenous-focused programs and initiatives.

Given the historical context of discrimination against Indigenous Canadians in schooling, Indigenous students are challenged with distinct barriers that shape educational experiences as they advance in their academic careers. Interviewees described how embedding content based on Indigenous cultures, perspectives, and histories into public schools can not only counter negative experiences for Indigenous students, but also facilitate respect for cultural diversity among non-Indigenous students, and serves as a mechanism to combat racism and prejudice in the school community.

We investigate how communities in China use schools to create and reproduce the values, knowledge, and social expectations that engender social capital. We focus on private and girls’ education, and report on the experiences of four schools between 1995 and 2005. We argue that, beyond schools’ contribution to the skills acquired by individual students, whether they promote the formation of social capital within communities should be a part of our assessment of their effectiveness. Schools as centers of activism can provide communities a forum for formulating their social demands and identities. In this context, social capital formation provides a useful heuristic for reclaiming the language of social justice and considering the human ends of education.

While migration has been part of the human experience for close to 200,000 years, we currently live in an era of mass migration. Children under the age of 18 are impacted by migration in multiple ways: a quarter of all children in OECD countries have an immigrant parent; in large cities across the developed world, between 40% and 65% of children are from immigrant or refugee families. Immigrant children and children of immigrants are the fastest growing demographic group in schools around the world. For at least the past two decades, evidence demonstrates that children and/or their parents arrive with high expectations for schooling and their children’s future aspirations, in general the longer the contact with schooling in their new countries, the lower their well-being. In this chapter, we will look at the data behind this evidence in a variety of contexts of displacement. We will highlight emerging new directions in education for newcomer/migrant populations as we look to promising practices in schools for migrant youths, their peers and their school communities.

In the early 1980s, institutional and development researchers began to question why schools in different countries around the world increasingly appeared alike in formal design, organization, and function. Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer (1985) offered a seminal neo-institutional argument that schools around the world are increasingly drawn up by the global sweep of modernization. A prerequisite for any country wishing to engage with and compete in the modern world, the authors argued, is establishing a system of mass schooling based on a set of core institutional standards and values that originated in the west but have since expanded around the globe. These standards and values require that schools be universally accessible and socially progressive, capably of equally and equitably integrating a citizenry – regardless of racial, ethnic, and gender-related distinctions – into the nation-state. The world model of education described by these theorists provides not so much an organizational blueprint for building modern school systems as a cultural schema for defining the national polity and forging a modern society through education. What makes schools everywhere look and act the same, they claim, is the utter invariability of this schema.[T]he striking thing about modern mass education is that everywhere in the world the same interpretative scheme underlies the observed reality. Even in the most remote peasant villages, administrators, teachers, pupils, and parents invoke these institutional rules and struggle to construct schools that conform to them. (p. 147)

A key tenet of the modern nation-state – embedded in the notion of progress – is the belief that our children can lead better lives than our own. Trust in the possibility of upward mobility for future generations drives movements of families around the world, and, indeed, drives the spirit of capitalism. In today's world, the notion of mass access to educational opportunity is a key element of the dream of upward mobility. This ideal is manifest in the huge public investment in schools that all nations must make, no matter how rich or poor, to signify membership in modern society.