Voices for Educational Equity is the online scholarly journal of the Center for Success in HighNeed Schools posted on the Center website http://www.center4success.com/.  Voices articles, opinion columns, and book and media reviews reflect contemporary educational priorities, including growing societal concerns about impacts of inequity.  Voices highlights scholarly research and innovative educator ideas and practices regarding emerging as well as persistent longtime issues and invites the perspectives of all stakeholders to promote a productive dialogue.  Unsolicited scholarly articles will be reviewed by scholar referees in the article subject field.  

 

Articles, columns, and reviews for publication in Voices for Educational Equity should be submitted as a Microsoft Word document in Times New Roman 12-point font, 1.15 line spacing, 1 inch margins, and with footnotes and references in APA format.   Email documents as Word attachments to Jerry Berberet, Ph.D., editor-in-chief (wgberberet@aol.com).  Case studies addressing equity concerns are especially welcomed. Articles and case studies should be approximately 2,500-5,000 words and include a short author bio (50 word limit – name, highest degree earned, institutional/ organizational affiliation, current professional position and email or contact information), 4-5 key words, an abstract of 100-200 words, a brief review of relevant research literature bearing on the article subject, a discussion of findings and results, a conclusion, and a reference bibliography. Columns are opinion pieces, ordinarily of 500-1,000 words, reflecting the views of the author. Book and media reviews should be 500-750 words in length. Authors are invited to email Jerry Berberet (wgberberet@aol.com) or call him (850-766-2656) to discuss a potential submission, request referee protocols, or to ask questions.  Past issues of the journal can be viewed on the Center’s website;  http://www.center4success.com

 

The ISSN Number of Voices for Educational Equity is 2771-8328.  Voices is posted as an online

“open access” journal twice annually. Voices is published by the Center for Success in High-Need Schools http://www.center4success.com. The publisher is Jan Fitzsimmons, Ph.D.(jan@center4success.com) president of the Center for Success.  The Center mailing address is: 28182 W. Savannah Trail, Barrington, IL 60010. Members of the Editorial Board for Voices for Educational Equity are: Annie Baddoo, Rockford University; Ava Belisle-Chatterjee, Columbia College Chicago, Emerita; Erica Dávila, Lewis University; Michael Dieter, Northern State University; Elvira Pichardo, Lewis University; William G. Berberet, Editor;                                 Jan Fitzsimmons, Publisher .

 

Voices for Educational Equity — Call for Submissions

Volume 22, Number 2 — “Child Friendly Education”

(Submission Deadline, September 15, 2026)

In the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, calls to “rebuild” or “improve” education have multiplied across policy circles, research communities, and public discourse. Many of these conversations have focused on methods of instructional techniques, remediation strategies, and classroom-level interventions designed to help children “catch up.” While method certainly matters, an exclusive focus on technique risks obscuring the deeper and more fundamental question of what it means for education to be genuinely child-friendly in a world marked by profound inequities.

Childhood, as Philippe Ariès argued in Centuries of Childhood (1962), is not a timeless or universal life stage but a historical and cultural construction, one shaped by shifting social norms, political forces, and collective understandings of who children are and what they deserve. In contemporary contexts, this constructed childhood is profoundly uneven: race, class, language, disability, geography, and immigration status all shape the conditions under which children grow, learn, and imagine their futures. A meaningful discussion of child-friendly education therefore requires grappling with the broader societal structures that harm children-racialized poverty, punitive social policies, community and state violence, environmental injustice, and inequitable access to health, safety, and stability. Each of these contextual factors influence student learning, and method alone is insufficient to ameliorate them.

Educational systems often mirror and intensify these disparities, offering some children safety and possibility while others encounter surveillance, exclusion, or structural neglect. Schools not only reflect these broader inequities but also participate in constructing deficit views of children themselves; as Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) notes, labels like “at-risk” pathologize children rather than the unjust conditions that shape their lives, obscuring the deeper education debt owed to communities historically denied equitable educational opportunity.

Purpose and Vision

This issue invites contributors to examine child-friendly education across preK-12 education through a justice-oriented lens, one that recognizes childhood as socially stratified and seeks to understand how schools, policies, histories, and cultural narratives shape children’s vastly different educational realities. We welcome scholarship that interrogates deficit-based narratives, centers children’s dignity and agency, and reimagines a world where all children can learn and flourish in educational environments built on policy and practices that are “child-friendly”. 

We welcome submissions from a wide array of educational stakeholders including but not limited to: Researchers, Teachers, paraprofessionals, Teacher educators, Parents, Policy makers, Social workers, Pediatricians, Psychologists, Child Care Workers/Advocates, Non-profits working on issues that impact educational outcomes including food, hunger, transportation, housing, safety etc.  Youth are especially invited to contribute to this topic. 

Guiding Questions for Contributors

1.    Historical Frames:  How have societies defined childhood, and child-friendly schooling, across different eras, and what does Ariès’s argument about childhood as a historical construct help us understand about equity today?

 

2.    Policy Structures:  Which educational policies advance or undermine equitable, child-friendly environments, and how do these policies differentially affect children across identity and geographic contexts?

 

3.    Conceptual Foundations:  What should/could child-friendly education mean in a world where social, economic, and political inequities deeply shape children’s lived experiences?

 

4.    Structural Inequities:  How do factors such as housing instability, disability, trauma, racialized surveillance, immigration status, or environmental injustice shape children’s well-being and learning in school contexts?

 

5.    Pedagogical Practices:  What does equitable, child-friendly pedagogy look like in practice, and where do commonly used “child-centered” approaches fall short when situated within inequitable systems?

 

6.    Children’s Voices:  How can children’s perspectives, experiences, and agency inform the design of more child-friendly educational spaces, and what methods best center their voices?

 

7.    Global and Cultural Contexts:  How do cultural traditions, political systems, or global inequalities shape visions of child-friendly education across different countries or communities?

 

8.    Imagining New Possibilities:  What might educational systems look like if child-friendliness and equity were treated as inseparable commitments, and how should schools respond to emerging challenges such as digital divides, climate instability, and post-pandemic trauma?

 

 

Voices for Educational Equity — Call for Submissions

Volume 23, Number 1 — “Numeracy”

(Submission Deadline, February 15, 2027)

 

For decades educators have been concerned about student performance on tests of language and mathematics literacy. Perhaps because of the divide between those who excel at math and those who suffer from math anxiety and poor math performance, greater attention has been placed on language literacy than minimal competence in mathematics literacy. This seems reflected in the State of Illinois literacy plan which mandates certain requirements be met in the school curriculum, in contrast with the State mathematics literacy plan which only suggests such content.

 

Educators and policymakers have not tackled well the issue of what persons need to know and be able to do with quantitative literacy, sometimes called “survival mathematics”—an issue quite separate from the well-established sequence of courses that a college or beyond mathematics major completes. This problem seems compounded because mathematicians alone have  usually been asked to define and create curricula for such literacy. The discipline focus of mathematicians and the difficulty mathematicians and non-mathematicians experience in communicating add to this challenge.

 

The numeracy movement that has emerged among educators recently may be a breath of fresh air. It provides an opportunity to address head on learning that every student needs for living in a world demanding competence with numbers plus the ability to reason quantitatively sufficient to manage daily functions. These include household financial calculations and performing as a literate consumer of numbers in the media and public policy as a citizen in our democratic society.

 

Google defines literacy as ‘the ability to understand, evaluate, use, and engage with written text to participate in society, achieve goals, and develop knowledge.”  Numeracy is defined as “the ability to access, use, interpret, and communicate mathematical information and ideas to manage mathematical demands in daily life,” including “counting, sorting, identifying patterns, measurement, and understanding numerical data.” Google again, numeracy applications include “managing personal finances, calculating, understanding risk/probability, and following spatial instructions.”

 

Perhaps numeracy should be seen as a broader literacy challenge than the discipline of mathematics alone, just as language literacy requires broader competency than what is normally considered the discipline of English language and literature. Neither literacy is a narrow discipline but a philosophy of learning focused on generalization rather than specialization, i.e. breadth rather than depth, general education knowledge and skills rather than study in depth associated with discipline specialization.

 

Thus, the responsibility for developing both literacies requires educators from across the curriculum to join together in defining what literacy means, e.g., fundamental theoretical understanding and competencies citizens need to function in the 21st century. Or, put another way, identifying reasoning capabilities at a basic level  necessary to survive and thrive in an increasingly complex and ever changing world.

 

The questions that follow are intended to stimulate contributions to Voices for Educational Equity for numeracy education:

 

1.      How might we think about numeracy as an educational philosophy?

 

2.      What do students need to know and be able to do as numeracy literate citizens in the 21st century?

 

3.      How might educators come together to develop numeracy curricula? Who should participate in such an effort?

 

4.      How might/can parents/family, policy makers, and employers participate in this effort?

 

5.      What definitions, policies, and programs currently exist that promote best practices in achieving numeracy literacy?

 

6.      What developments are on the horizon that educators should consider in preparing students for competency in numeracy with the future in mind, e.g. in what ways might AI help or hinder student growth in numeracy?

 

 

 

 

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