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Research has documented how white teachers often fall short of their anti-racist intentions. However, much of this research is done with preservice teachers or teachers across disciplines. The authors investigate stories in which white English teachers who teach substantial proportions of black students and who self-reported anti-racist goals nevertheless fell short of those goals. The purpose of the study is to understand the tensions between racial liberalism and racial literacy in their pedagogy.

The authors snowball sampled 12 veteran white high school English teachers (3–27 years’ experience) who taught in schools with substantial proportions of black students. The authors used a two-stage interview process to narrow the sample to 7 teachers who confirmed their anti-racist intentions and who wrote narratives of moments when they tried to be anti-racist, but the lesson failed in some way. The authors used a three-stage narrative analysis to analyze how racial liberalism and racial literacy were reflected in the narratives.

The veteran English teachers, despite their anti-racist intentions, told narratives that reflected racial liberalism, portraying racism as an individual and interpersonal phenomenon. Some narratives showed teachers who had taken steps toward racial literacy, but no narratives showed a fully developed sense of racial literacy, portraying the layers of institutional and structural racism in English education.

The sample suggests that veteran white English teachers are subject to similar limited racial literacies as novice teachers. While the authors found glimmers of racial literacy, they still note the work necessary to equip veteran English teachers with the racial literacies necessary for anti-racist instruction. The authors propose directions for teacher education, systemic support and professional development.

This index accompanies the index that appeared in Reference Services Review 16:4 (1988). As noted in the introduction to that index, the articles in RSR that deal with specific reference titles can be grouped into two categories: those that review specific titles (to a maximum of three) and those that review titles pertinent to a specific subject or discipline. The index in RSR 16:4 covered the first category; it indexed, by title, all titles that had been reviewed in the “Reference Serials” and the “Landmarks of Reference” columns, as well as selected titles from the “Indexes and Indexers,” “Government Publications,” and “Special Feature” columns of the journal.

Stemming from the doctoral research, the purpose of this paper is to comment on disabled international students’ experiences of using assistive technology and transcription services in facilitating an equal educational experience to that of non-disabled students.

By using such qualitative research methods as interviews and a focus group, the aim has been to discuss the benefits gained as well as difficulties encountered whilst utilising these facilities.

Thus, a range of barriers to disabled international students in the area of technological support and adaptations based on their identities as “disabled”, “international” and “disabled international” students is identified. This has lead to a further discussion of the extent to which the barriers to the disability services concerned are created, reinforced and exacerbated by the interplay of students’ different identities.

The absence of any academic research into such unique experiences of disabled international students, particularly in the British context, highlights the original and timely nature of this work.

This paper documents the growing dependence of Australian governments on the use of private funding to provide infrastructure and related services to the public. Using a Habermasian framework proposed by Broadbent and Laughlin in 1999 the paper examines their second research question: “what is the nature of PFI and who is regulating its application?” to frame an analysis of the complex relationships between steering media and steering mechanisms in determining the operation of privately financed projects (PFP) in Australia. A secondary, but related concern is to explore the linkages between the macro‐economic policy debates that gave rise to PFP and their implications for the micro‐organisational control issues. The debate about whether or not PFP are a response by governments to macro economic pressures remains unresolved. Similarly, there is evidence that governments are not as successful as private‐sector consortia at identifying and shifting risk and, therefore, at achieving value‐for‐money. Ultimate PFP outcomes depend on two factors: broad policy parameters established by governments (steering mechanisms) either discreetly, or through other appointed steering media; and execution at the micro or organisational level, that is, on the decisions and actions taken by a variety of actors interfacing with PFP.

The author of this paper aims to reflect on the past 14 years of English education in the USA and the resulting effects of state standards and standards implementation on secondary English teachers.

Controversy surrounding standards implementation often includes balancing the struggle between teacher autonomy and district-mandated curriculum. The journey described here includes four roles in education: first, an undergraduate in a teacher education program at a state university; second, a classroom teacher learning to create pacing guides based on the standards; third, a graduate student writing a dissertation about standards implementation; and, fourth, a teacher educator who works with pre-service and practicing teachers.

Educators at all levels must determine how to best navigate standards to help students succeed in the classroom, and what teaching practices must endure even in the face of increased standardization.

Lack of curricular autonomy and few teacher-centered professional development opportunities during early standards implementation experiences led the author to understand the importance of a workshop model of standards implementation for teachers. In addition, strong support for reading and writing workshops in the secondary English Language Arts classroom is also provided, including the specific Common Core Standards met during these classroom activities.

Performance measurement and programme evaluation have been promoted as a central mechanism of recent Australian public sector (APS) reform. Outlines recent reforms in the APS and identifies links between evaluation and performance information. Identifies the major issue of credibility, when performance information is produced internally and not verified externally. A lack of performance systems and standards can create difficulties for both internal and external programme evaluations. Concludes that: reforms introduced to evaluate performance in the APS were promoted with high expectations which have only partially been fulfilled; the present system is internally focused with a narrow role for evaluation and a lack of credibility because of the independence issue; the present systems associated with the performance approach and its evaluation are not providing enough information to deal with the tough questions of the effectiveness of government programmes. Proposes that a middle ground between internal and external programme evaluation strategies be adopted. This allows the strengths of internal evaluation to be retained. At the same time, it allows the possibility of improving programme evaluation by adding external independent verification and an extended effectiveness role.

Public private partnerships (PPPs) are a recent extension of what has now become well known as the “new public management” agenda for changes in the way public services are provided. PPPs involve organisations whose affiliations lie in respectively the public and private sectors working together in partnership to provide public services. This special issue of the Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal explores this new development, which, in its most advanced form, is contained in the UK’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) but is now spreading across the world in multiple forms. This introduction provides an overview of this development as well as an outline of the seven papers that make up this special issue. These seven papers are divided into two parts – the first four looking at different aspects of PFI and the latter three providing three country‐based (from the USA, New Zealand and Australia) studies of PFI/PPP. Many questions about the nature, regulation, pre‐decision analysis and post‐project evaluation are addressed in these papers but many research questions remain unanswered, as this Introduction makes plain.