Historically, schools serving impoverished families trapped in America's urban "ghettos" have been resistant to community participation. Enhanced participation is critically needed, however, if long-term urban school-reform projects and efforts to develop more empowering, community-supporting forms of pedagogy are to succeed. This article examines the most influential and/or promising efforts to foster more authentic engagement between schools and inner-city communities. The author finds that while efforts to develop school-based models have largely failed, a range of community-based efforts remain promising. If educators, scholars, and policymakers are truly interested in improving school-community relations, then they will need to become more deeply informed about community forces and structures and more directly involved in efforts to strengthen community organizations.

In this article, we critically examine the nature of the "consensus" reflected in educational standards used to orient high-stakes assessment programs. We analyze two complementary cases of practice in the assessment of teaching. One focuses on the discourse of standards creation and one examines how standards like these are typically used to orient assessment development and judgments about individual performance. We offer two (partially competing) theoretical perspectives that might illuminate and guide our practices in this currently undertheorized and underexamined area of standards development. One is based in the discourse ethics of Jü rgen Habermas and one is based in critical elaborations of Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. We argue that conventional consensus-seeking approaches to the development and public review of educational standards tend to mask diversity and relinquish authority for consequential decisions to assessment developers who work in far less public circumstances. We draw on hermeneutic philosophy to offer a more pluralist approach that allows dissensus to be represented and taken into account in the assessment process.

The emergence of postmodern ideas in the educational literature has complicated the field’s understandings of oppression and resistance. While important, this postmodern influence has been problematic in its tendency to stress the relatively nurturing forms of “pastoral” control generally experienced by the privileged. Such a focus can direct attention away from the often brutal discipline experienced by those who are more marginalized. The article examines contexts where pastoral or disciplinary forms of control predominate, noting the limited forms of resistance (if any) generated by each. It then looks to more sophisticated visions of resistance developed by scholars and activists. The article concludes by exploring the limitations inherent in any single approach to understanding or resisting domination.

Developed at the end of the 1900s, largely in his short-lived Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, John Dewey's vision of democratic education has remained influential for over a century. Yet, as he grew older Dewey himself increasingly lost faith in the ability of schools, alone, to create a more democratic society. Drawing on data available from the Laboratory School, this paper expands upon Dewey's concerns. Ultimately, I argue that Dewey's educational approach failed to equip students to act effectively in the world as it was (and still is), and, further, that Dewey's model of democracy, while extremely useful, is nonetheless inadequate to serve the varied needs of a diverse and contentious society.

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