This issue overview cautions readers about a paradigmatic shift in which many administrative and political functions of government are being terminated or transferred to the private sector. Most glaring are the areas of traditionally public institutions, such as the schools, the welfare apparatus, and the security functions of the state. It represents an abandonment of the Great Society and New Deal project in favor a "corporatocracy." The editors show how each contribution to the issue fits into this larger pattern.

California has the worst youth-gang situation in the country. Law enforcement officials claim that up to 250,000 gang members live in the state--almost half of all gang members in the U.S. The gang epicenters are in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Yet gang violence is also rampant in the rural and suburban areas--including the Modesto/Merced area, where Highway 99 cuts through the "Crystal Meth Capital of the World," to outlying areas of both L.A. and San Francisco, to the mountains, the beaches, and high deserts. Building more jails and increasing repression have not worked--even Governor Swarzenegger has called for an overhaul of the state’s overcrowded prison system. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court recently declared the state’s racial separation policies in prisons to be unconstitutional. It is time to explore new ideas, awaken new imaginations, and create new pathways for healing.

In this article, the authors argue that a more dynamic and holistic understanding of the ways urban youth resist and transform coercive policies and detrimental conditions in their communities is crucial to developing more effective youth development strategies. Citing examples of young peoples’ collective capacity to change debilitating public policies, the authors explore critical factors in urban youth’s social activism. This discussion draws on a theoretical framework that responds to fragmented models of community action and youth agency. In addition, the article identifies critical aspects of youth-driven initiatives, including community social capital, youth civil rights and civic participation, and collective agency. The authors present a model that accurately situates the actions of urban youth in the context of their social conditions, allowing practitioners and researchers to identify the resources young people need to effect changes in their communities. This article confronts the lack of a comprehensive theory and attendant successful urban policy by identifying strategies that may enrich support for marginalized youth taking action for justice in their communities.

This article explores the development of agency in an intercultural, interracial, economically diverse setting that lies along the borders of three female lives. The author, a mentor of two teenage girls through the Big Brothers and Big Sisters Program, begins by asking why, given equally oppressive histories and multiple risk factors, these two young women experienced opposite trends in their school success. She proposes that a possible explanation lies in a vast difference in opportunities for agency, as well as differences in the intensity of cultural and social borders each has to negotiate. Although the concept of agency traditionally implies individual choice and action, this article asks whether educational institutions could play a larger role in promoting a positive sense of agency, along with a focus on helping youth navigate complex cultural borderlands. This type of support, she argues, is particularly critical for young people in child protective custody.

The primary focus of this article is to examine who is profiting from the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and how it is harming the education of English Language Learners. The authors investigate how the Bush administration has openly supported private corporations that profit from NCLB while simultaneously backing a conservative coalition organized to discredit and ultimately dismantle public education. The article seeks to provide a critique of NCLB, and to demonstrate the grass-roots resistance against it that is growing throughout the nation.

A local struggle of teachers, students, parents, and community members to resist imposition of a corporate designed, scripted high school English curriculum in a Northern California school district was examined in the context of U.S. public education policies joined with corporate interests. The curriculum was aligned with state mandated high-stakes tests, but it did not allow for sustained reading of whole books. The actions and events during one semester in 2005 revealed issues and tensions of the school board, the district administrators, and the resisting group surrounding curriculum content, teaching strategies, methods of assessment, and school structures, funding, and control.

This article argues that the cause of the whitening of the American teaching force is erroneously understood as a recruitment problem resulting from lack of interest in the field among Latinos, Asians, and African-Americans; that the real causes rest on a racially skewed set of criteria for the initial selection of teachers; that the results of this selection system are far more damaging than is generally acknowledged, particularly for urban students; that the selection system has its roots in white racism, both institutional and ideological; that the erection of an equitable teacher selection system will require struggle by those adversely affected by the present system; and that an equitable and effective system would select candidates first on the basis of effectiveness in the classroom and would then require each to add to his or her knowledge base those elements missing in his or her undergraduate education.

This article explores the impact of recent credential reform in California (SB 2042) on the preparation of bilingual teachers within the state. Bilingual teacher educators throughout the state were surveyed and interviewed regarding changes to their bilingual credential programs. Findings indicate that there have been major changes to the delivery of instruction for prospective bilingual teachers. These changes include "infusion" of bilingual content into methodology courses, elimination and/or reduction of courses related to bilingual pedagogy, and reductions in the numbers of students of color in teacher education programs. These changes have implications for the bilingual teaching force that will negatively affect access and equity to instruction for English-language learners.

This review of Melanie Bush's Breaking the Code of Good Intentions finds the book to be highly satisfying for all readers, but especially for scholars, students, and administrators in higher education. This ambitious work is committed to reconstructing the public understanding of the role of race today.

This review of Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, shows how the book offers a small, but important, antidote to the problem facing the U.S. as it loses ground vis-à-vis other nations in terms of academic achievement and school graduations, as well as in terms of applying math skills to real-life situations and keeping children on the technical track.

This article contends that the academy is faced with economic, political, and cultural threats that are having deleterious effects on the university as an institution and on academicians as individuals. Despite these threats and ill effects, some academicians appear unconcerned with these trends or even welcome them. This essay addresses two possible reasons for this disconnect: (1) some academicians may not fully appreciate the challenges facing the academy, and/or they may not fully appreciate how responses to these challenges affect their own work-a-day lives, and (2) some academicians may be concerned, but feel that many others are not. To address the first possibility and to support the essay’s first contention, this essay illustrates how current economic, political, and cultural trends in society foster strains in higher education that challenge not only the academy as an institution, but also the academic freedom and economic livelihoods of individual academicians. To address the second possibility, this essay outlines four different general sets of assumptions and goals (models) about academia’s purpose. These models are designed to capture the majority of views on the topic. It reviews these models in light of the external trends and university responses, and in doing so, it demonstrates that no matter which model one subscribes to, there is reason for concern and a need for collective action in response to these threats. This essay sets the groundwork for a discussion of the appropriateness of organizing collective action in response to these external challenges and deleterious internal policy responses.

This article discusses the use of military language and symbols at a "military-style" charter school in California. The use of military language is discussed as a vehicle for promoting the identity of students as “cadets.” Military culture is identified as a tool for reinforcing a military worldview among cadets. The essay notes the unintended outcome of a "military-style" charter school on minority youth -- their enlistment in the military.

"Counter-recruitment" activism has been one of the most visible segments of the American antiwar movement during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. This article takes a critical look at counter-recruitment claims and tactics, and argues that the fundamental power and promise of this movement lies in its ability to shine a much-needed light on the direct involvement of U.S. schools and education with U.S. militarism and imperialism. To fully realize this power and promise, however, counter-recruiters must move beyond a number of shortcomings and misdirections that often threaten to limit their work: these include a privileging of domestic U.S. interests; a narrow and surface-level definition and understanding of school-military connections; and a basically Not in My Backyard political orientation.