Preparation of Two Participatory Social Housing Interventions in a Marginalised Roma Community in Romania

The first desegregation efforts in the marginalised and segregated communities in the Pata-Rât area were carried out within the frames of two social housing projects (between 2014–2017 and 2020–2023). Although a housing first methodology would have been more adequate in the context of a marginalised community, given the shortcomings of the Romanian social assistance system, implementation was impossible. In this context, it was necessary to develop a system to access social housing but also to create a reasonably ‘fair process' at the community level. Thus, in both interventions, the starting point for developing the social housing criteria was to survey the community in order to explore the community members' preferences regarding the criteria to be considered in the selection of the beneficiary families for the social houses. The surveys covered all the inhabitants of the Pata-Rât area, that is 219 households in the first survey and 282 households in the second. The survey results served as the basis for the development of the criteria for accessing social housing. In this article, we present and discuss the results of the community surveys from 2016 and from 2020, the year of the pandemic outbreak. Differences were found in the prioritisation of criteria, with an increasing preference for those reflecting vulnerability/needs (e.g., number of children, years spent in the community, disability) and decreasing preference for the ones indicating family resources (e.g., employment, income, education). These differences reflect the increase in poverty and loss of resources occurring in the community during this period, due both to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to the relocation of the 35 better-off families in the first Pata-Cluj project.

Editorial

In the special article, Professor Abdelaziz Berghout, the Dean of the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization of the International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM), names AbuSulayman's books and major accomplishments, especially his work during the many years he spent at IIUM on enhancing the integration of Islamic revealed knowledge and human sciences and the Islamization of disciplines. The second article, by Buad Khales, zooms into a case study from Palestine and analyzes the responses of kindergarten students about virtual learning. The books reviewed address pertinent topics to Islamic education, including the curriculum for Islamic studies, the environmental wisdom of the Islamic heritage, educational policy and Muslim identity in conflict areas in the Southern Philippines, and Islamic schools in France and minority integration.

FROM MASSIVE RESISTANCE TO QUIET EVASION: THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATIONAL EQUITY AND INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA

This fifty-year retrospective on Virginia's 1971 constitutional revision argues that state constitutional language has both the power and promise to effect policy change in the area of educational equity. In the years after Brown, Virginia dramatically resisted efforts to integrate. Then the Commonwealth embraced a moderate stance on integration, as part of its 1971 constitutional revision, to end de jure segregation and provide a "quality" education for "all children." Looking to new quality standards produced by a Board of educational experts, Virginia optimistically turned to the technocracy movement, hoping to take education out of politics. New aspirational language was meant to deepen the legislature's commitment to public schools and repair Massive Resistance's damage to public schools. Looking back fifty years later, however, it is clear that this constitutional revision, while successfully meeting its goals around Massive Resistance, did not address underlying problems it is often assumed to have solved, such as inadequate funding or persistent de facto segregation. Other states ' journeys battling the same issues have looked different, and these differences highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses of Virginia 's approach. This Note ultimately argues that the 1971 constitutional revision never intended to solve these problems, and thus, the work for educational advocates right now is not to come up with more clever litigation, but to convince Virginians to agree on a fairer school system perhaps through a new constitutional revision. In the context of new public concern about racial justice following George Floyd's death and the Coronavirus crisis, I argue that Virginia today may finally be ready to finish the work started in 1971.

Integration Versus Meritocracy? Competing Educational Goals During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Alongside the immediate challenges of operating schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, over the past year, parents, students, and policymakers around the country have also debated equity and access to some of the country's most elite and segregated public schools. This qualitative case study examines how New York City activists conceptualized educational equity during the pandemic. Conceptually framed by Labaree's (1997) typology of the three competing purposes of education-democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility-we document different lessons learned from the pandemic by integration activists, who emphasized school integration for democratic equality;and meritocratic activists, who prioritized retaining the existing stratified system mainly to foster social mobility and social efficiency. Our findings highlight the challenge of sustaining a vision oriented around the public good amid powerful framings emphasizing the individual purposes of education.