Social Reform

Over the past several years, Jonathan Kozol has visited nearly 60 public schools. Virtually everywhere, he finds that conditions have grown worse for inner-city children in the 15 years since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. First, a state of nearly absolute apartheid now prevails in thousands of our schools. The segregation of Black children has reverted to a level that the nation has not seen since 1968. Few of the students in these schools know White children any longer.

Over the decades, the Mastery Learning method has seen a resurgence in terms of positive research. Such a method is needed to help address the student achievement gap. Many schools are improving or adequate on their own, but a methodology that ensures that students both master material and do so using their respective motivations and learning style can best address said achievement gaps.

Listen to Secret to Success: The Evolution of Public Education & the Workforce, which was originally written in 2019, to learn about changes that were already happening or being done in public schools that cause problems in our everyday life as business owners, employers, job seekers, kids in school, and really everyone in some way or another.

Losing Control is a vivid history of the past half century of immigration politics and policy. It is also a dramatic ground-level account of how the story took shape. Kammer describes the economic and cultural forces that both pushed millions of migrants from home communities in Latin America and pulled them northward to the US. He shows how the backlash gradually emerged from the frustrations of American workers and communities who felt overwhelmed by the influx and betrayed by their government.

Why has land reform been such a failure in South Africa? Will expropriation without compensation solve the problem? What can be done to get the land programme back on track? Tembeka Ngcukaitobi tackles these questions and more. Going back in history, he shows how Africans’ communal land ownership was used by colonial rulers to deny that Africans owned the land at all. He explores the effect of the Land Acts, Bantustans and forced removals. And he considers the ANC’s policies on land throughout the 20th century, during the negotiations of the 1990s, and in government.

An explosive new look at the pressures on today's teachers and the pitfalls of school reform, Confessions of a Bad Teacher presents a passionate appeal to save public schools, before it's too late. When John Owens left a lucrative job to teach English at a public school in New York City's South Bronx, he thought he could do some good. Faced with a flood of struggling students, Owens devised ingenious ways to engage every last one. But as his students began to thrive under his tutelage, Owens found himself increasingly mired in a broken educational system.

After decades of off-shoring, downsizing, shuttered factories, and stranded blue collar workers, the United States is on the edge of an industrial renaissance. This is news that would have seemed beyond improbable even a decade ago, but companies like Motorola Mobility, Apple, BMW, Bosch, and Volkswagen are opening plants and committing millions of dollars to build new products here.

America today confronts a host of urgent problems, many of them seemingly intractable but some we are entirely capable of solving. In Five Easy Theses, James M. Stone presents specific commonsense solutions to a handful of our most pressing challenges, showing how simple it would be to shore up Social Security, rein in an out-of-control financial sector, reduce inequality, and make health care and education better and more affordable.

Right to DREAM makes a compelling argument for the DREAM Act and comprehensive immigration reform. William A. Schwab explores the key issues surrounding this legislation: What are the issues that divide? What do the proponents and opponents of the DREAM Act argue? Is there a middle ground? Is compromise possible?

George Washington’s nightmare has been realized. Despite his warning about the negative effects of party loyalties, the US government has become paralyzed by partisanship, allowing national challenges to go unaddressed. As an independent candidate for US Senate in 2018, Neal Simon witnessed the destructive nature of modern American politics. He experienced firsthand the perverse incentives that push candidates and lawmakers to ideological extremes. He watched as party leaders resisted pragmatic solutions to our nation’s problems.

For the majority of young adults today, the transition to independence is a time of excitement and possibility. But nearly five million young people experience entry into adulthood as abrupt abandonment, a time of disconnection from school, work, and family. For this growing population of Americans, which includes kids aging out of foster care and those entangled with the justice system, life screeches to a halt when adulthood arrives. Abandoned is the first-ever exploration of this tale of dead ends and broken dreams.

Ogni giorno bambini e adolescenti entrano nella più grande organizzazione del nostro paese. Cosa li accoglie? Stando alle cifre più recenti, la scuola italiana non gode di buona salute. Studenti e insegnanti faticano a trovare motivazioni davanti ai tanti problemi e all'impoverimento delle risorse a disposizione.

In Future Driven, David Geurin describes how to conquer the status quo, create authentic learning, and help your students thrive in an unpredictable world. He shares how to simultaneously be more committed to your mission while being more flexible with your methods.

This book argues that the structure of public education is a key factor in the failure of America's public education system to fulfill the intellectual, civic, and moral aims for which it was created. The book challenges the philosophical basis for the traditional common school model and defends the educational pluralism that most liberal democracies enjoy. Berner provides a unique theoretical pathway that is neither libertarian nor state-focused and a pragmatic pathway that avoids the winner-takes-all approach of many contemporary debates about education.

In When Grit Isn't Enough, Nathan investigates five assumptions that inform our ideas about education today, revealing how these beliefs mask systemic inequity. Seeing a rift between these false promises and the lived experiences of her students, she argues that it is time for educators to face these uncomfortable issues head-on and explores how educators can better serve all students, increase college retention rates, and develop alternatives to college that don't disadvantage students on the basis of race or income.

Synthesizing cutting-edge research and first-hand reporting, Peg Tyre offers parents far smarter and more sophisticated ways to assess a classroom and decide if the school and the teacher have the right stuff. Passionate and persuasive, The Good School empowers parents to make sense of headlines; constructively engage teachers, administrators, and school boards; and figure out the best options for their children.

As the "stunningly successful nonprofit organization, Teach For America" ( New York Times) celebrates its 20th anniversary, its founder Wendy Kopp issues a passionate and inspiring summation of what she and TFA corps members have learned: that educational inequity—the achievement gap—is a solvable problem, and that the key to solving it—in a single classroom, a school, or system-wide—is leadership.

Community Educators: A Resource for Educating and Developing Our Youth asserts that the relationships between education, community, and democracy are inseparable and illustrates that education is broader than just schooling. This book is a call for action and responsibility both individual and collective to transform education beyond simply reforming schools.

Ever since Socrates, teaching has been a difficult and even dangerous profession. Why is good teaching such hard work? In this provocative, witty, and sometimes rueful book, David K. Cohen writes about the predicaments that teachers face. Like therapists, social workers, and pastors, teachers embark on a mission of human improvement. They aim to deepen knowledge, broaden understanding, sharpen skills, and change behavior. One predicament is that no matter how great their expertise, teachers depend on the cooperation and intelligence of their students, yet there is much that students do not know.

The Math Myth expands Hacker's scrutiny of many widely held assumptions, like the notions that mathematics broadens our minds and that the entire Common Core syllabus should be required of every student. He worries that a frenzied emphasis on STEM is diverting attention from other pursuits and subverting the spirit of the country. In fact, Hacker honors mathematics as a calling (he has been a professor of mathematics) and extols its glories and its goals.