Social Reform

Since Joshua Steckel began work at a Brooklyn public high school as its first-ever college guidance counselor, every one of the hundreds of graduates he has counseled has been accepted to college, many to top-flight schools with all expenses paid. But getting in is only one small part of the drama of his students’ stories. In a riveting work of narrative nonfiction - winner of a Studs and Ida Terkel award - Hold Fast to Dreams follows the lives of 10 of Josh’s students as they navigate the vast and obstacle-ridden landscape of college in America.

NEA's Reach for Power exposes the National Education Association (NEA) for what it really is and provides a hands-on guide for teachers, parents, and communties to increase their voices in bringing education back to the children.

Unsere Kinder, die heute eingeschult werden, gehen im Jahr 2070 in Rente. Doch wir überfrachten sie mit Wissensstoff, den sie für ihr Leben kaum brauchen...

In this genial and challenging overview of endless debates over school reform, Rick Hess shows that even bitter opponents in debates about how to improve schools agree on much more than they realize - and that much of it must change radically. Cutting through the tangled thickets of right- and left-wing dogma, he clears the ground for transformation of the American school system. Arguing that a fundamentally 19th-century system can't be right for a 21st-century world, Hess suggests that uniformity gets in the way of quality, and urges us to create a much wider variety of schools, to meet a greater range of needs for different kinds of talents.

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.

Can money buy high-quality education? Studies find only a weak relationship between public school funding and educational outcomes. In The Money Myth, W. Norton Grubb proposes a powerful paradigm shift in the way we think about why some schools thrive and others fail. The greatest inequalities in America's schools lie in factors other than fiscal support. Fundamental differences in resources other than money explain the deepening divide in the success of our nation's schoolchildren.

What should we do about the police? After the murder of George Floyd, there’s no institution more controversial: only 14 percent of Americans believe that “policing works pretty well as it is” (CNN, April 27, 2021). We’re swimming in proposals for reform, but most do not tackle the aggressive culture of the profession, which prioritizes locking up bad guys at any cost, loyalty to other cops, and not taking flak from anyone on the street. Far from improving public safety, this culture, in fact, poses a danger to citizens and cops alike.

In this powerful narrative non-fiction debut, the lives of these three characters provide listeners with a vivid and sobering portrait of education in twenty-first-century America. Hope Against Hope works in the same tradition as Random Family and There Are No Children Here to capture the challenges of growing up and learning in a troubled world.

When The New Press, the Center for American Progress, and the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted Peoples and Family Movement issued a call for innovative reform ideas, over 300 currently and formerly incarcerated individuals responded. What We Know collects two dozen of their best suggestions, each of which proposes a policy solution derived from their own lived experience.

What do people do when they count? What do numbers really mean? We all know that people can lie with statistics, but in this groundbreaking work, eminent political scientist Deborah Stone uncovers a much deeper problem. With help from Dr. Seuss and Cookie Monster, she explains why numbers can't be objective: in order to count, one must first decide what counts. Every number is the ending to a story built on cultural assumptions, social conventions, and personal judgments.

Who controls American immigration policy? The biggest immigration controversies of the last decade have all involved policies produced by the President - policies such as President Obama protecting Dreamers from deportation and President Trump banning immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations. While critics of these policies have been separated by a vast ideological chasm, their broadsides have embodied the same widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, ought to dictate who may come to the United States and who will be forced to leave. This belief is a myth.

Despite being the wealthiest nation on earth, the United States spends much of its health-care money and resources pursuing the wrong goal: curing people after they get sick. In this provocative book, Nicholas J. Webb charts a bold new path that puts the focus not on reactionary treatment, but on anticipation and prevention.

Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Messenger offers the first humane, journalistic expose of an American tragedy: modern-day debtor's prisons and how they've destroyed the lives of poor Americans.

Nicole M. Joseph investigates factors that contribute to the glaring underrepresentation of Black female students in mathematics. Joseph's account calls attention to educational structures and practices that contribute to race- and gender-based stratification in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In her assessment of the intersectional difficulties facing this marginalized group, Joseph offers a critical view of the existing mathematics education research, practice, and policies that have neglected Black girls and women; and then provides suggestions for reform.

In June 1985, a young Black man named Darryl Hunt was falsely convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of a white copyeditor at the local paper. Many in the community believed him innocent and crusaded for his release even as subsequent trials and appeals reinforced his sentence. Finally, in 2003, the tireless efforts of his attorney combined with an award-winning series of articles by Phoebe Zerwick in the Winston-Salem Journal led to the DNA evidence that exonerated Hunt.

You don't need more money, or time, or even another election cycle to bring transformational change to your community. What you need is to believe that daily microdoses of good over years and years can create a great return. Stop waiting for the big change moment and seize the good that you can do today.

AI: A phrase that intrigues some, confuses many, and brings fear to others. Whether you're a teacher looking to stay ahead or a parent curious about AI's impact on your child's education, you have questions. Can AI enhance teaching without overwhelming you? Can it tailor learning experiences? Can it be ethical and protect student data? If these concerns resonate, you've found the right book.

Long at the forefront of a movement advocating for gun reform as a matter of public health, Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl has been on constant media call in the aftermath of fatal shootings. But the 2018 Nashville killings led him on a path toward recognizing the limitations of biomedical frameworks for fully diagnosing or treating the impassioned complexities of American gun politics. As he came to understand it, public health is a harder sell in a nation that fundamentally disagrees about what it means to be safe, healthy, or free.

In 1995, Karen Horwitz, aka the CHANGE EVERYTHING TEACHER, discovered our schools suffered from the 'Harvey Weinstein syndrome'—the powerful get their way no matter how wicked until someone finds the courage to expose them. She wrote a memoir to do to those running our schools what that brave actress who testified against Weinstein did. Listeners will learn why we have school shootings and how to end them and restore democracy. She names the corruption that transformed our schools from revered institutions to mere shells White Chalk Crime™ and reveals how it dismantled democracy.

For nearly a century, the Rikers Island jail complex has stood on a 413-acre manmade island in the East River of New York. Today it is the largest correctional facility in the city, housing eight active jails and thousands of incarcerated individuals who have not yet been tried. It is also one of the most controversial and notorious jails in America. Part on-the-ground reporting, part deep social and architectural history, These Walls is an eye-opening look at Rikers Island and the American justice system—and a challenge to our long-held beliefs about what constitutes power and justice.