Social Reform

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.

Schools may rise and fall, but education fads remain forever. When it comes to new ideas, sifting the wheat from the chaff can seem like an impossible task. Finally, help has arrived from one of Canada’s best-known education writers. A Sage on the Stage leaves no stone unturned in its relentless assault on the foolish fads infecting public education. From incomprehensible no-zero policies to discovery math that never adds up, this book debunks many of the most pervasive fads in schools today. It also lays out a positive case for the things that do work.

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.

In These Schools Belong to You and Me, MacArthur Award-winning educator, reformer, and author Deborah Meier draws on her 50-plus years of experience to argue that the purpose of universal education is to provide young people with an "apprenticeship for citizenship in a democracy". Through an intergenerational exchange with her former colleague and fellow educator Emily Gasoi, the coauthors analyze the last several decades of education reform, challenging narrow profit-driven conceptions of school success.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Radical is this fearless advocate's incisive, intensely personal call-to-arms. Rhee combines the story of her own extraordinary experience with dozens of compelling examples from schools she's worked in and studied-from students from unspeakable home lives who have thrived in the classroom to teachers whose radical methods have produced unprecedented leaps in achievement. Radical chronicles Rhee's awakening to the potential of every child, her rage at the special interests blocking badly-needed change, and her recognition that it will take a grassroots movement to create outstanding public schools.

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.

In Soar, Banks shares the experiences of individual kids from the Eagle Academy as well as his own personal story. He discusses the specific approach he and his team use to drive students, from tapping into their natural competitiveness and peer-sensitivity to finding teachers who know firsthand the obstacles these students face.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

This expensive education reform would be financed without raising taxes. A new cryptocurrency would be created. The effects of such education reform would be felt at school, home, and all public interactions. Student Manifesto—The Power of Paying Kids to Learn is a book for interested parents, involved teachers, and policymakers. It is never too late to instigate deep changes for the benefit of all.

Exploring the full sweep of federalism from the founding to today, Kettl focuses on pivotal moments when power has shifted between state and national governments - from the violent rebalancing of the Civil War, when the nation almost split in two, to the era of civil rights a century later, when there was apparent agreement that inequality was a threat to liberty and the federal government should set policies for states to enact. Despite this consensus, inequality between states has only deepened since that moment.

Eine gute Bildung ist entscheidend für die Zukunft unserer Kinder und Jugendlichen. Aber was genau ist gute Bildung, vor allem in einer Zeit der globalen Umbrüche, in der die Definition von Arbeit sich massiv wandelt? Was brauchen unsere Jüngsten von uns, damit sie sich Wissen und Können aneignen und gleichzeitig Orientierung im Leben finden? Wie lernen sie, wie Leben und Zusammenleben im 21. Jahrhundert wirklich gelingt? Unsere Bildungseinrichtungen kriegen das nicht allein hin, verhindern es oft sogar.

In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over 100 individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability.

A must-hear firsthand exploration of why Asian students are outpacing their American counterparts and how to help our children excel in today’s competitive world.

In contrast to the anxiety surrounding our voting system, with stories about voter suppression and manipulation, there are actually quite a few positive initiatives toward voting rights reform. Professor Joshua A. Douglas, an expert on our electoral system, examines these encouraging developments in this inspiring book about how regular Americans are working to take back their democracy, one community at a time.

Almost overnight, America's public schools have become morally toxic. They are especially poisonous for the hearts and minds of children from religious families of every faith - ordinary families who value traditional morality and plain old common sense. Parents' first duty is to their children - to their intellect, their character, their souls. The facts on the ground point to one conclusion: Get out now.

Standards are the foundation of our educational systems today. Fairness, rigor, and high achievement for all students are the focus of standards-based schools. Yet the standards movement means nothing if it does not improve student achievement in the classroom. In this revised edition, Dr. Reeves provides step-by-step guidance on how to design and implement standards-based performance assessment to make improved teaching and learning a reality in the classroom.

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.