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The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which an intervention lesson could help with elementary pre-service teachers’ critical racial knowledge around school segregation.

The author, an Elementary Social Studies Methods Instructor, developed and modeled lessons of “doing race” in social studies as one of the ways to assist elementary pre-service teachers with critical racial knowledge and commitment to do race in their future classrooms. This paper focuses on one of the modeled lessons, which centered on the topic of school segregation.

Based on the analysis of class discussion and student work, the author documented the ways in which the modeled lesson engaged pre-service teachers in disrupting the dominant discourses and teaching practices on the topic of school segregation and developing the critical understandings needed to successfully teach about race and racism in elementary classrooms.

The paper details actions meant to demonstrate to elementary pre-service teachers the benefits of an elementary social studies topic viewed and taught through a critical race lens. In doing so, it calls attention to the possibilities and limitations of a single lesson that targets antiracist practices.

In the context of educational segregation by ethnic group, it has been argued that rigorous pairwise segregation comparisons over time or across space should be invariant in two situations: when the ethnic composition of the population changes while the distribution of each ethnic group over the schools remains constant (invariance 1), or when the size distribution of schools changes while the ethnic composition of each school remains constant (invariance 2). This paper makes two contributions to the segregation literature. First, it argues by means of the Mutual Information or M index, which is neither invariant 1 nor 2, that both properties have strong implications, and it provides reasons to defend that the overall segregation index need not satisfy either one. Second, nevertheless, it is shown that in pairwise comparisons this index admits two decompositions into three terms. In the first decomposition, a term is invariant 1 and also satisfies a weak version of invariance 2. In the second decomposition, a term is invariant 2 and also satisfies a weak version of invariance 1. It is shown that these decompositions can be used to reach the analogous ones obtained in Deutsch et al. (2006).

How can the author, as social studies methods instructors, assist future elementary teachers develop the knowledge and skills to engage young students in critical examinations of race and racism, and feel empowered to take action against racial oppression? The purpose of this paper is to share one of many possible ways of “doing race” in elementary social studies teacher education.

First, the author proposes the topic of school segregation as a relevant and engaging inroad for elementary students to learn about race and racism. Then, the author outlines and problematizes a dominant approach to teaching about school segregation in elementary classrooms and suggests an alternative approach informed by critical race theories. Next, the author provides counterstories to dispel the dominant narrative of school segregation from an Asian critical race theory perspective. This is followed by an explanation of the lesson the author teaches in the author’s elementary social studies methods course that utilizes these perspectives and counterstories.

By using Asian-American counterstories of school segregation, the lesson seeks to assist preservice elementary teachers in disrupting the dominant teaching practices and discourses around school segregation and helps preservice teachers develop the critical understandings and competencies needed to successfully teach about race and racism in elementary classrooms.

The author concludes by discussing the possibilities and implications of the lesson.

Examines patterns of social exclusion in the compulsory school system of England and Wales. Suggests that the weakening of local government control of the school system from the 1980s onwards led to a very real fear that market forces would lead to increased polarisation of school intakes and results in terms of social background. Lists key policy changes and early research relevant to the increased use of market forces in compulsory education. Describes the methods used to investigate the impact of this policy change on the secondary school system. Summarises the findings before presenting some tentative explanations and conclusion. States that the Local Education Authority still have a significant role to play.

The pattern of racial segregation in U.S. elementary and secondary schools has changed significantly over the last 25 years. This chapter examines the relationship between the racial composition of schools and the choices white parents make concerning the schools their children attend. Restricted access files at the Bureau of the Census allow us to identify each household's Census block of residence and, in turn, suburban public school districts and urban public school attendance areas. We find that the racial composition of schools and neighborhoods are very important in the school and location decisions of white families.

Purpose – We propose the Information Theory of Segregation, which holds that all measures of segregation and of inequality are united within a single conceptual framework. Accepting this framework implies that all measures of inequality can also be used to measure segregation and that all measures of segregation are fundamentally based on measures of inequality.

Methodology – We state several propositions that follow from the information theory perspective, and show mathematically that many common measures of inequality and segregation satisfy the propositions.

Findings – We show that all common measures of inequality can be used to form measures of segregation and that the resulting measures can be applied to binary, polytomous, and continuous variables. Further, we develop several new measures, including a Gini Segregation Index (GS) for continuous variables and Income Dissimilarity Index (ID), a version of the Index of Dissimilarity suitable for measuring economic segregation. We show that segregation measures can easily be adapted to handle persons of mixed race, and describe the Non-Exclusive Index of Dissimilarity (NED) and the Non-Exclusive Entropy Index of Segregation (NEH). We also develop a correction for structural constraints on the value of segregation measures, comparable to capacity constraints in a communications channel, which prevent them from reaching their theoretical maximum or minimum value.

Originality – Placing inequality and segregation measures in a common framework is useful for several reasons. It highlights a common mathematical structure shared by many different segregation measures, and it suggests certain useful variants of these measures that have not been recognized previously.

The Remember: The Journey to School Integration lesson introduces students to the ideas of segregation and school integration. The lesson is designed to be a combination of teacher-led ins-truction and student-centered learning. Students build and develop their background knowledge on the topics of segregation and the integration of public schools. Once a knowledge base has been established, students look at the pictures from Toni Morrison’s book, think critically about the message being conveyed in them, and then create their own comprehensive response to the material presented in the entire lesson.

Sweden is characterised by high social regulation and an overall high social cohesion of context and structural elements of the school system and thus could be described as a hierarchist system. This position is strong and longstanding in Sweden and, with the exception of a short period of decentralisation and deregulation from the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s, it has strengthened during the past two decades. However, diversifying elements threatening the social cohesion have been observed in Sweden. Severe school segregation is observed, which undermines the democratic values for a school for all. It is plausible that the deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s enabled successful schools to develop, meaning that teachers and school leaders could make use of research in relation to local needs and preconditions. However, this also meant that the deregulation worked as a barrier to evidence-informed practice within unsuccessful schools, as they were left alone. Since their improvement capacity was low and they lacked professional networks, teachers and school leaders got segregated and isolated when it came to making use of research. This situation paved the way for a wave of re-regulations aiming at supporting unsuccessful schools. Successful schools seem to use these regulations for enabling improvement; however, it is questionable how it works for unsuccessful schools. The regulations on a national level concerning curriculum, marking changes, and a clear focus on professional learning and instruction, seem to have enabled the national goal achievement. Nevertheless, there are a large group of schools where the regulated and national support work as a barrier to challenge the local school culture and enable change.

Integration is a fundamental mandate of schooling in democratic and differentiated societies. This chapter analyzes the consequences generated by an increase in number of students without Italian citizenship in Italian schools, and the development of multiethnic classrooms. When non-Italian pupils comprise >25–50% of the pupils in classrooms, it’s worth questioning: Are these classrooms segregated? Which factors affect school integration and for whom? The chapter presents the results of the first survey on classrooms with a “high density” of students with an immigrant background carried out in Italy. This study is based on a sample of 1,040 students enrolled in lower secondary education in Lombardy. We use statistical indicators related to two dimensions of integration: (a) the institutional dimension (school access and achievement), and (b) the relational dimension (well-being and absence of conflicts among peers). Data analysis included indexes and a correlation matrix between indexes, regression analysis, and cluster analysis. Results demonstrate a positive correlation between the rate of non-native students in the classroom and low degree of integration, but also the complexity of factors at stake such as gender imbalance and the high concentration of students whose families have a low Socio-Economic Status (SES), independently from citizenship. These results enabled us to de-construct the concept of school integration, identifying a plurality of integrative factors and providing suggestions for intervention.

School leaders in the United States are increasingly embracing marketing practices in order to promote their schools in more competitive conditions. Yet while policymakers are actively encouraging such conditions, little attention has been paid to the equity effects of these practices. Advancing from the insight that marketing materials can illuminate some of the underlying incentive structures to which schools must respond, this study examines patterns in the marketing materials in two metropolitan areas with the most competitive education markets in the United States. Web-based materials for all schools in Washington, DC and post-Katrina New Orleans were analyzed, noting how individual schools and different types of schools represent their racial makeup. By analyzing these differences in traditional-public, charter, and private schools, we were able to see emerging patterns that suggest the role of market forces in school organizational behavior, with cautionary lessons for how different types of students are valued.