This issue of Social Justice, co-edited by Susan Roberta Katz (University of San Francisco), Gilberto Arriaza (San Jose State University), and Emma Fuentes (University of San Francisco), helps us comprehend the war being waged over public education and services for our communities, youth, and children. It offers a critical theoretical framework on how social justice work can dismantle the considerable barriers erected by the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy. Contributors to this tightly knit anthology are committed to creating social change in school communities ravaged by NCLB policy and the single-minded focus on high-stakes testing. The volume looks at the way in which challenges to education, welfare, and notions of security affect particular groups and entire communities, as well as how they respond, resist, and, in some instances, create innovative alternatives. It advances our understanding of the ways in which communities and institutions can support the development of agency among underserved youth, particularly given the Right's dominance over the nature and content of education, and thus address the roles of public institutions in a democracy. It also helps us understand the dramatic shift away from the Great Society and New Deal project into a society under the control of powerful shareholders of big corporations, or toward a “corporatocracy.”

ISSN: 1043-1578. Published quarterly by Social Justice, P.O. Box 40601, San Francisco, CA 94140. SocialJust@aol.com.