Social Reform

Teachers are the most important determinant of the quality of schools. We should be doing everything we can to help them get better. In recent years, however, a cocktail of box-ticking demands, ceaseless curriculum reform, disruptive reorganisations, and an audit culture that requires teachers to document their every move have left the profession deskilled and demoralised. Instead of rolling out the red carpet for teachers, we have been pulling it from under their feet. The result is predictable.

The digital environment has radically changed how and what students need and want to learn, but has educational delivery radically changed? Get ready to be challenged to accommodate today’s learners as opposed to allowing default classroom practices. With its touches of humor and choose-your-own-adventure approach, the audiobook encourages listeners to search for interesting, relevant or required material and then jump right in.

Extraordinary Learning for All delivers a hopeful, humane, realistic, and compelling portrait for how we must reinvent schooling for a new century, drawing on the voices and experiences of real school communities who are on that journey and illuminating the specific actions that school and system leaders can take to spark these journeys in their communities.

Following in the rich traditions in African American cooperative economic and educational thought, teacher-organizer Jay Gillen describes the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP) as a youth-run cooperative enterprise in which young people direct their peers' and their own learning for a wage. BAP and similar enterprises are creating an educational network of empowered, employed students. Gillen argues that this is a proactive political, economic, and educational structure that builds relationships among and between students and their communities.

One of the greatest American achievements in the 20th century was the creation of public schools and universal education, an ideal now deeply at risk. Cornell University professor Noliwe Rooks provides a critical account of the making and unmaking of public education in Cutting School, the first book to foreground how vast racial and economic divides are part and parcel of the push to privatize our education system.

Can America's public schools, long resistant to change, meet the challenges of globalization and new educational alternatives? Not by doing what they're doing today. So argues Building Engaged Schools, a book that challenges the faulty assumptions that guide American public education.

Beyond These Walls is an ambitious and far-ranging exploration that tracks the legacy of crime and imprisonment in the United States, from the historical roots of the American criminal justice system to our modern state of over-incarceration, and offers a bold vision for a new future. Author Tony Platt, a recognized authority in the field of criminal justice, challenges the way we think about how and why millions of people are tracked, arrested, incarcerated, catalogued, and regulated in the United States.

The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders, yet reforms to reduce the numbers of those incarcerated have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, an ever-widening carceral state has sprouted in the shadows, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship - posing a formidable political and social challenge. In Caught, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state remains so tenacious in the United States.

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.

Higher education faces a looming demographic storm. Decades-long patterns in fertility, migration, and immigration persistently nudge the country toward the Hispanic Southwest. As a result, the Northeast and Midwest...expect to lose five percent of their college-aged populations between now and the mid-2020s. In Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, Nathan D. Grawe has developed the Higher Education Demand Index (HEDI), which relies on data from the 2002 Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) to estimate the probability of college-going using basic demographic variables.

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.

Drawing on nearly three decades in education - from his mother’s after-school program on Chicago’s South Side to his tenure as Secretary of Education in DC - How Schools Work follows Arne as he takes on challenges at every turn: gangbangers in Chicago housing projects, parents who call him racist, teachers who insist they can’t help poor kids, unions that refuse to modernize, Tea Partiers who call him an autocrat, affluent white progressive moms who hate yearly tests, and even the NRA, which once labeled Arne the “most extreme anti-gun member of President Obama's Cabinet.”

With falling wages and rising inequality, persistent unemployment, failing schools, and broken cities, have America's best days come and gone? In America Needs Talent, Jamie Merisotis, a globally recognized leader in philanthropy, higher education, and public policy, explains why talent is needed to usher in a new era of innovation and success and why deliberate choices must be made by government, the private sector, education, and individuals to grow talent in America.

Why has successful school reform been so difficult to achieve, despite decades of well-intentioned efforts, endless rhetoric, and billions of dollars of investment? Why do most U.S. schools continue to produce disappointing results? Why is there such a disconnect between the schools we need and the schools we have? In this thoughtful and insightful book, Ronald A. Wolk tackles these questions head-on, identifying key assumptions that have shaped the debate on school reform for the past several decades.

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.

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.

As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience—an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers—is in danger of becoming a thing of the past. In College, prominent cultural critic Andrew Delbanco offers a trenchant defense of such an education, and warns that it is becoming a privilege reserved for the relatively rich.

As leaders in education, teachers face unprecedented challenges. Yet, they remain at the forefront of shaping future generations, cultivating thinkers, problem-solvers, communicators, and innovators. Unfortunately, the rising stress, lack of support, and difficulties in maintaining classroom engagement have driven teacher resignation rates to an all-time high. This is why Channon Essex, April Sabral, and Angee Costa joined forces to bring the education community a groundbreaking system—one designed to motivate students to learn and reignite teachers' passion for teaching.

Saving Schools traces the story of the rise, decline, and potential resurrection of American public schools through the lives and ideas of six mission-driven reformers: Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Shanker, William Bennett, and James Coleman. Yet schools did not become the efficient, egalitarian, and high-quality educational institutions these reformers envisioned. Indeed, the unintended consequences of their legacies shaped today's flawed educational system.