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Given that a large proportion of refugees and forced im/migrants today are school-age, schools are widely assumed to be sites where integration will happen. How this integration will occur and whether education policies facilitate social cohesion is unclear. Focusing on California and Berlin as examples of politically left-leaning states that receive immigrants in substantial numbers, this chapter seeks to examine their immigration, integration, and education policies. Using an original conceptual framework, this chapter analyzes how relevant federal and state policies have evolved since the 1980s in these two contexts. This chapter considers integration to be the process by which immigrants identify with the receiving country (RC) and their previous contexts, provided that the RC is supportive and accepting. The goal of integration is less inequality along ethnic or cultural lines. By analyzing policies in terms of immigrant students’ identity formation and conceptions of equality, this chapter argues that the evolution of such policies in Berlin and California has not always been linear. Moreover, while both states consider diversity to be positive, their policies do not extend to facilitating a new culture that productively operationalizes the diversity of immigrant and non-immigrant students.

Comparative education has typically focused on differences across countries and sought to explain these differences as a function of differences in historical legacies, in societal prerequisites (as in variants of functionalist analysis), or in internal patterns of competition and conflict across social classes and status groups. In these studies the independent and the dependent variables of interest are endogenous characteristics of national societies. The latter are presumed to operate mostly as “closed systems” with their past trajectories (think path dependencies) and their present states (think present system needs or current power configurations) shaping the educational outcomes of interest. These endogenous characteristics may depict properties of the economy, e.g. degree of industrialization, the polity, e.g. democratic versus authoritarian regimes, the culture, e.g. Confucian group centric versus Protestant individual oriented, etc. or the educational system itself, centralized versus decentralized. The latter, of course, may be viewed both as a dependent variable influenced by the degree to which the polity is centralized or decentralized as well as an independent variable, influencing the growth of enrollments. In the classical Collins (1979) formulation the comparatively greater growth of post-primary enrollments in the United States was an outcome of status competition which itself was made more likely by a decentralized educational system. The latter in turn reflected and was shaped by a decentralized political system.

In this chapter, we utilize qualitative and quantitative data from a yearlong study in four urban Chinese middle schools to investigate the learning environments for girls at these schools; the behavior and performance of girls and boys in these environments; and what factors impact that behavior and performance. This study particularly focuses on socialization through moral education and the examination system as two sources of authority motivating students’ behavior and performance in school. In the analysis, girls attending three co-educational schools are compared with girls attending one single-sex school, and outcomes for girls are also considered alongside those of boys in the co-educational institutions. Findings indicate that although moral education is particularly emphasized by teachers at the all-girls school, female misbehavior and engagement with teachers is no different for girls attending the single-sex school compared to girls in co-educational schools. Furthermore, differences in outcomes between females and males across schools transcend school-level differences for misbehavior and engagement. However, at the same time, girls at all co-educational schools report higher Chinese and English grades compared to their math and science grades, whereas all-girls school students report no such differences in grades. In regression analysis, socialization variables appear to explain more about students’ misbehavior, whereas the desire to progress to higher levels of schooling explains more about grades and engagement with teachers. That said, socialization variables including moral attitude and attachment to teachers matter more for girls’ math and science grades and their engagement with teachers as compared to boys. This research provides a rare comparative look at education for urban Chinese students and offers new insights about what matters most for girls’ behavior and performance in school.

Six million Iraqis were displaced during the Iraq-Daesh War, and although many have returned to their communities, there remain approximately 1.3 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) across the country. Today, approximately 25% of IDP children in Iraq are out of school (REACH, 2020). This study foregrounds the voices and family histories of IDPs when navigating educational access and makes a methodological argument for the need for increased qualitative research in post-conflict settings. Using the conceptual framework of navigation, the author presents displaced persons as agentic, dynamic people with lived histories, present realities, and imagined futures which inform their journey through the education system. Semi-structured interviews with 16 IDPs who identified as parents or caregivers were conducted virtually. Displaced Iraqis value education for different reasons, ranging from basic literacy to employment to societal improvement. In doing so, the author challenges the barrier-dominant framework through which IDP educational access is often understood and nuanced with a temporal lens which requires us to identify IDPs as (1) persons capable of making choices for themselves, (2) givers as well as receivers, and (3) persons who aspire to goals beyond basic survival.

Entrepreneurial approaches to public mass education are not easily developed or managed by public sector institutions. Instead, private sector entities are often responsible for the development and implementation of innovative and entrepreneurial education. Part of the reason may be the resistance to change that isomorphism in mass education engenders, but the involvement of privately-funded, organized, and managed organizations plays a significant role as well. Private sector-driven educational change has become the dominant mode of entrepreneurship in 21st century national educational systems, but there are challenges and obstacles to privately managing public sector institutions such as education and the activities or curricula that comprise its core. To understand this phenomena the promises and challenges for innovation and entrepreneurship are discussed through an institutional framework.

Our chapter examines the ways national developments in Australia and New Zealand over the past two decades reflect distinctively antipodean understandings of educational leadership and management. Our interest is twofold. We are concerned about the extent to which these understandings are reflected in strategies designed to enhance the quality of school leadership. We are also concerned about the extent to which these strategies represent progress towards achieving ‘sustainable’ school leadership. We define sustainable leadership in terms of both building leadership capacity within the organisation and embedding lasting organisational change (Fink & Brayman, 2006; Hargreaves & Fink, 2006; Spillane, 2006). The concept used here implies both models of distributed or shared leadership and leadership succession.

Dynamics of social and symbolic capital within diverse school settings affect how stakeholders (i.e., administrators, teachers, parents, students) influence, interpret, and/or implement the complex demands of education leadership. Educational leadership, as simultaneously possessing both constant and fluid tendencies, is fundamental to establishing benchmarks to successfully impact the educational experience. Having the requisite social and symbolic capital serves as a conduit for accessing quality networks as well as the signification of having gained reputable, legitimate schooling experiences. Notwithstanding, the transferability of those forms of capital provides the venue for K-12 administration to ‘teach effectively’ and ‘lead responsibly’ within leadership contexts, particularly given this era of accountability. The intersection of the theoretical (teaching) and applied (leading) functions of educational leadership lends a democratic model for managing the resulting politics and generating leadership strategies as representative of social and symbolic capital.

This chapter considers the work of preparing educators to teach in culturally sustaining/revitalizing ways. It is based on a qualitative study that examined 60 preservice interns’ cross-cultural experiences in schools in Alaska Native villages. The chapter explores the interns’ descriptions of the schooling contexts related to school-based instruction of Indigenous languages and cultures and considers pedagogical implications for preservice programs that aim to prepare culturally sustaining/revitalizing educators. Findings include accounts of instructional practices in classrooms teaching Indigenous languages and cultures and themes presenting the schooling contexts as crisis, struggle, and hope. Implications for teacher education are discussed consisting of pedagogical responses to the contexts interns described and considerations for supporting preservice teachers’ transformative learning.

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become widespread in poor countries as a way to alleviate current poverty and provide investments in human capital that improve families’ living conditions in the long-term. The first goal is accomplished when poor families receive money from governments on a monthly basis. The second goal is reached by conditioning the cash transfers on certain behaviors such as children's regular school attendance. However, these programs may also have impacts on time use decisions within beneficiary households, particularly with respect to time spent working. Using data from 2003, we measure the impact of the Brazilian Bolsa Escola CCT program on children's and parents’ labor status using the econometric framework of policy evaluation. Probit regressions and propensity score-matching methods show that this program reduces the probability of work for children aged 6–15, increases school enrollment, and increases mother and father participation in the labor force.