Social Reform

In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for nine dollars an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough and wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War.

In Punished for Dreaming Dr. Bettina Love argues forcefully that Reagan’s presidency ushered in a War on Black Children, pathologizing and penalizing them in concert with the War on Drugs. New policies punished schools with policing, closure, and loss of funding in the name of reform, as white savior, egalitarian efforts increasingly allowed private interests to infiltrate the system. These changes implicated children of color, and Black children in particular, as low performing, making it all too easy to turn a blind eye to their disproportionate conviction and incarceration.

In this very personal work - adapted from the original number one best seller, which the New York Times calls "as compelling as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so" - acclaimed lawyer and social justice advocate Bryan Stevenson offers a glimpse into the lives of the wrongfully imprisoned and his efforts to fight for their freedom.

More than two million students are enrolled in for-profit colleges, from the small family-run operations to the behemoths brandished on billboards, subway ads, and late-night commercials. These schools have been around just as long as their bucolic not-for-profit counterparts, yet shockingly little is known about why they have expanded so rapidly in recent years - during the so-called Wall Street era of for - profit colleges.

Ken Robinson is one of the world's most influential voices in education, and his 2006 TED Talk on the subject is the most viewed in the organization's history. Now, the internationally recognized leader on creativity and human potential focuses on one of the most critical issues of our time: how to transform the nation's troubled educational system.

We’ve all had great teachers who opened new worlds, maybe even changed our lives. What made them so great? Everyone agrees that a great teacher can have an enormous impact. Yet we still don't know what, precisely, makes a teacher great. Is it a matter of natural-born charisma? Or does exceptional teaching require something more? Building a Better Teacher introduces a new generation of educators exploring the intricate science underlying their art.

In this down-to-earth guide, Dr. Gillian Parekh unpacks the realities of how ability and disability play out within schooling, including insights from students, teachers, and administrators about the barriers faced by students on the basis of ability. From the challenges with ability testing to gifted programs to the disability rights movement, Parekh shows how ableism is inextricably linked to other forms of bias. Her book is a powerful tool for educators committed to justice-seeking practices in schools.

A major architect of welfare reform as President of the Board of Trade and as Home Secretary, Winston Churchill also continued to push a radical social agenda while running the Navy. While he was in charge of the Royal Navy between October 1911 and May 1915, not only were there major improvements in pay and conditions for sailors but detailed consideration was also given to the future of the spirit ration; to the punishing and eradicating of homosexual practices; to the spiritual concerns of the fleet; and to the regime of corporal punishment that underpinned naval discipline for boy sailors.

Why is it so hard to get students to pay attention? Conventional wisdom blames iPhones, insisting that access to technology has ruined students' ability to focus. The logical response is to ban electronics in class. But acclaimed educator James M. Lang argues that this solution obscures a deeper problem: how we teach is often at odds with how students learn. Classrooms are designed to force students into long periods of intense focus, but emerging science reveals that the brain is wired for distraction. We learn best when able to actively seek and synthesize new information.

Despite being immensely popular - and immensely lucrative - education is grossly overrated. In this explosive book, Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity - in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee.

A. C. Grayling makes the case for a clear, consistent, principled, and written constitution, and sets out the reforms necessary - among them addressing the imbalance of power between government and Parliament, imposing fixed terms for MPs, introducing proportional representation, and lowering the voting age to 16 (the age at which you can marry, gamble, join the army, and must pay taxes if you work) - to ensure the intentions of such a constitution could not be subverted or ignored.

In this visionary book, Leslie Valiant argues that understanding the nature of our own educability is crucial to safeguarding our future. After breaking down how we process information to learn and apply knowledge, and drawing comparisons with other animals and AI systems, he explains why education should be humankind's central preoccupation. Will the unique capability that has been so foundational to our achievements and civilization continue to drive our progress, or will we fall victim to our vulnerabilities?

We, as a nation, have become desensitized to the shock and pain in the wake of mass shootings. In the bottomless silence between gunshots, as political stalemate ensures inaction, the killing continues; the dying continues. From a Taller Tower attends to the silence that has left us empty in the aftermath of these atrocities. Veteran journalist Seamus McGraw chronicles the rise of the mass shooter to dismantle the myths we have constructed around the murderers and ourselves.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? by award-winning writer Yong Zhao offers an entertaining, provocative insider's account of the Chinese school system, revealing the secrets that make it both "the best and worst" in the world.

Getting into a top-ranked college has never seemed more impossible, with acceptance rates at some elite universities dipping into the single digits. In Who Gets in and Why, journalist and higher education expert Jeffrey Selingo dispels entrenched notions of how to compete and win at the admissions game and reveals that teenagers and parents have much to gain by broadening their notion of what qualifies as a "good college". Hint: It's not all about the sticker on the car window.

With Mental Health, Inc., award-winning investigative journalist Art Levine delivers a Shock Doctrine-style exposé of the failures of our out-of-control, profits-driven mental health system, with a special emphasis on the failures of the pharmaceuticals industry, including the treatment of children with antipsychotics and disastrous PTSD protocols for veterans.

Do teachers have a front-row seat to America’s decline? Jeremy S. Adams, a teacher at both the high school and college levels, thinks so. Adams has spent decades trying to instill wisdom, ambition, and a love of learning in his students. And yet, as he notes, when teachers get together, they often share an arresting conclusion: Something has gone terribly wrong. Something essential is missing in our young people. Their curiosity seems stunted, their reason undeveloped, their values uninformed, their knowledge lacking, and, most worrying of all, their humanity diminished.

The liberal arts educational system is under attack. Governors in Texas, Florida, and North Carolina have announced that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts. Majors like English and history - which were once very popular and highly respected - are in steep decline, and President Obama has recently advised students to keep in mind that technical training could be more valuable than a degree in art history when deciding on an educational path.

This book contains the fundamental works of Marxism, Anarchism and Bolshevism: The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg; The Conquest of Bread by the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin; Anarchism: What it Really Stands For by Emma Goldman; The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin; Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It by Leon Trotsky.

Here is an unapologetic look into the factors that have caused so many Blacks to think and act in the negative way they do towards themselves and others. This timely body of work is from a man well versed in the American educational system, as well as educational systems throughout the world.