This article argues for the relevance and democratic potential of a form of progressive schooling that has developed in Germany over the past decade, the Gemeinschaftsschule (GMS), or community school. Using this type of school as a case study in democratic education, the author responds to relevant criticism and highlights the promise of this approach to satisfying democratic educational ideals that the United States and other national contexts have long fallen short of. Drawing on a developing distinction between integration and inclusion in German educational thinking, and ongoing conversations in philosophy of education broadly, the author argues for the relevance of the GMS to the international comparative education community. Grounded in the work of Amy Gutmann and John Dewey, the second half of the article defends the GMS as a compelling actualization of democratic education, in both its structure and pedagogical commitments.

Shadow education, or private supplementary tutoring aimed at enhancing academic performance and examination preparation, has become a global phenomenon and a significant focus in international and comparative education research. Although much of the literature examines its determinants and effects on academic outcomes, its impact on students’ engagement in mainstream classrooms remains underexamined. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of fifth graders in South Korea, this study aimed to fill this research gap by investigating the effect of shadow education on behavioral engagement. Regression analyses showed that students who participated in shadow education during both the fifth and sixth grades exhibited 0.114 standard deviations greater behavioral disengagement in the sixth grade than their nonparticipating peers, after controlling for family, student, and school characteristics. This empirical evidence validates concerns among policy makers and educators in countries with expanding shadow education systems about its potential to undermine student engagement in mainstream education.

Although educational reform takes place often in many systems, authentic improvements have remained scanty worldwide. Reflecting on such a global reality and based on the transdisciplinary emergence of educational improvement science, I advocate an alternative field, new and open to advancement in education, that is, comparative and international educational improvement science. There are at least five characteristics articulated for the new framework, including a novel concept of education as improvement, with a scopes, improvements, and problems (SIP) model in its replicable 3I process (identification, implementation, and improvement). With a neo-improvementalist philosophy that improvability is a genic nature of education and that improvement is of education, by education, and for education, I reclaim the idealism of equity and social justice as a renewed ultimate value and mission for the new field, continued from the 67th Comparative and International Education Society Annual Conference theme, “Improving Education for a More Equitable World.”

Epistemic injustice, racism, material imbalances between the Global North and South, and the dominance of neopositivism in comparative and international education (CIE) research are shaping global knowledge production processes. In the field of sustainability education, emphasis is often placed on UN frameworks and goalposts, with little consideration of local knowledges that predate the creation of international institutions and the very concepts of nation-states themselves. We argue that such one-way, simplistic narratives of the assumed absence of sustainability capacities neglect and, hence, contribute to the erasure of local knowledges on sustainable living. Our goal in this article is to “repair” such epistemically unjust practices by theorizing the concepts of budi and obal to offer alternative imaginaries of sustainability in higher education—ontologically, epistemically, and axiologically. The article is written in a manifesto format to inspire an urgent conversation on this challenging issue with creativity, care, consideration, and imagination.

Although Sustainable Development Goal 4 claims that governments “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all,” our research on Indigenous students in Mexican higher education finds a huge gap between measures to promote student access to universities and the “interculturalization” of study programs to ensure their cultural and linguistic relevance. In this article, we discuss findings of our project Indigeneity and Higher Education in Mexico, which contrast the situation of exclusion of Indigenous knowledge in mainstream higher education institutions with ethnographic data documenting first steps to include Indigenous languages and epistemologies in so-called intercultural universities. Examples from Nahuatl, Totonac, Ayuuk, and Maya regions in Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Chiapas show how this diversification challenges the very notion of knowledge and its transfer inside universities. Finally, we relate our findings back to the future need to interculturalize and decolonize the issue of “inclusive and equitable quality education.”

Autocracy has arrived in the United States.It has only been a few short months since our back-to-back editorials in which we raised concerns about the global rise of authoritarianism (Salajan and jules 2024a) and anticipated the potential ominous results of the November 2024 US presidential elections (Salajan and jules 2024b), both of which will have consequential repercussions on education in the United States and abroad.We do not claim to have been prescient about the events we are currently experiencing in the United States, as we simply observed and reported on trends obvious to anyone following the worrying array of economic, political, and social developments antithetical to principles underpinning democratic societies.Yet not even this acute awareness of the potential perils these turbulent times evoke could have prepared one for the alacrity, zeal, viciousness, and callousness with which the new Trump regime has moved to dismantle the foundations of democracy and its institutions in the United States.In itself, this would be disconcerting enough, if it were not for the fact that the first convicted felon to serve as US president leads the charge, as the standard bearer for the so-called law and order Republican Party that has surrendered to his whims.Taking a page from the authoritarian playbook perfected by Russia's Vladimir Putin and Hungary's Viktor Orbn, as well as various other dictators' totalitarian or illiberal experimental laboratories, and seeking to rule like them (Sky News 2025), the felon and autocrat in the White House has set it upon himself to bulldoze the US governmental institutions to the ground and upend the US Constitution.At the time our editorial went to press on June 15, 2025, Donald Trump had signed 161 executive orders since his first day of his second term in office (Federal Register, n.d.), a number of them targeting education with titles either bombastically aimed at "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling" or cloaking the closure of the US Department