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The purpose and significance of Power, Voice, and the Public Good: Schooling and Education in Global Societies aim to highlight the defining nature and impact of globalization in contemporary educational policy and praxis with particular attention to changing relations in local, state, national, and international contexts, from pre-school to postsecondary education. While globalization impacts major issues such as poverty, social justice, terrorism, citizenship, immigration, language, and human rights, the nature and appropriation of education and schooling remain at the center of these issues (Suárez-Orozco & Qin-Hilliard, 2004). That is, educational systems, policies, practices, and praxis in Mexico, Thailand, India, Korea, the United States, the West Indies, and other nation states addressed in this edited volume require responding to and engaging with the new challenges, conflicts, opportunities, and costs of globalization.

For indigenous peoples around the world, schooling and education are fraught with extreme challenges within the current realities of globalization. Indigenous knowledge, perspectives, and pedagogy in Africa, Asia, and the Americas are rarely included in books and courses that deal with history and philosophy of education, and there is widespread belief that non-Western and indigenous educational traditions and realities are not comparable to Western educational traditions and have little to offer discussions about education (Reagan, 2005). That is, the larger discourse of educational thought and practice, as Timothy Reagan suggests in the quote preceding this introduction, has been extremely biased in its treatment of anything non-Western; instead simplistic misunderstandings and misrepresentations reify the larger effects of cultural and epistemological ethnocentrism, colonialism, and Western imperialism.

Power, Voice and the Public Good: Schooling and Education in Global Societies comes at a most propitious time in our tumultuous world. With the dawn of the new millennium, our global problems of poverty, hunger, disease, war, inadequate schooling, abuse and exploitation, homelessness, and natural disaster have become ever more challenging. That such issues have profound consequences on children across the globe is of no small consequence. It would appear that issues of social equity, social justice and democracy have been subverted in the quest for profit, dominance and social control. Amidst it all, we have become borderless societies where problems from one nation state encumber the resources and priorities of other nation states. Power, Voice and the Public Good: Schooling and Education in Global Societies, while focusing largely on schooling and education in global contexts, provides a lens to view the nexus between schooling and many of the aforementioned global problems which confound us all. Many years ago, the noted anthropologist Margaret Mead stated “There is no greater insight into the future than to recognize that when we save our children, we save ourselves” (Mead, 1991, p. 2).¹ Her statement is as true today as it was many years ago. The chapters in this volume present challenges, but they also present opportunities for all of us to bring our best judgments and efforts to confront the very interdependent cultural and material dilemmas whose resolutions are necessary for global survival and growth.

The proportional diminution of African American males in higher education is a complex societal issue and, as with most complex issues, defies simple solutions. The complexity of the issue is grounded in a less than humane history and the resulting social, cultural, economic, emotional, mental, and spiritual factors that to varying degrees have been shaped by that history (interview with Wilson, 1997). These factors are intimately and intricately interwoven into one another forming a whole that is not easy to analyze and characterize.

United States immigration policy is one of the most dynamic and fiercely argued public policy issues today – often including questions of how many and from where. Poor economic conditions overseas, perceptions of a relative abundance of opportunity in the United States, flight from persecution and upheaval, and revolutions in communication and transportation are often cited as the major factors explaining historic and current waves of immigrants (legal and illegal) to U.S. shores (Batchelor, 2004; Borjas, 2004; Porter, 2006). U.S. immigration legislation is also a key factor in determining the numbers and composition of America's new residents. The focus of this chapter therefore consists of the costs associated with providing illegal immigrants with the benefit of free, public schooling within the context of globalization. More specifically, given the broader social, political, and economic parameters of the immigration debate and its meaning, the chapter discusses the legal and educational issues faced in the United States by those undocumented students who desire to attend public schooling, as well as the ways current state and federal laws both empower and discourage them.