ABSTRACT
Introduction The idea that public education systems and their policies are the products of social conflicts and compromises raises a series of questions: Why and what kinds of tensions exist? Who is in conflict and over what? And why and how are compromises reached? These questions about the way that schools work and their relations with society, or the more direct and open questions of what schools do and who benefits (Apple & Weis, 1983), are part of a broad field that tries to make sense of the relationship between education and differential power in society. Critical educational theories have grappled with these and other issues, offering a variety of answers over the years. And as new theories have developed, the solutions have become more complex and nuanced, as a multiplicity of (sometimes contradictory) dynamics, factors, powers, and players, local and global, have been added to the equation.
