This book is about the outmoded educational model in which American children all across the United States continue to be educated with, and why this educational model is crippling the middle-class and slowly putting America behind other emerging economies.Many of the ideas are not novel, nor does this book claim them to be.It is a portrayal, however, of how long many of these ideas have been on the table, have proven to have been effective, but have been killed in legislatures in many of t...

An urgent case for protecting public education, from one of America's best-known education expertsIn this landmark book, Diane Ravitch - former assistant secretary of education and a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum - examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions that she once staunchly advocated. Drawing on over forty years of research and experience, Ravitch critiques today's most popular ideas for restructuring schools, incl...

Now includes “The Life Inc. Guide to Reclaiming the Value You Create”In Life Inc, award-winning writer Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. The resulting ideology, corporatism, has infiltrated all aspects of civics, commerce, and culture—from the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self, from the invention of central currency to the privatization of ba...

The Great Recession is not done with us yet. While the most acute part of the economic crisis is past, the recession's most significant impact on American life still lies in the future. The personal, social, and cultural changes that result from severe economic shocks build and manifest themselves only slowly. But history shows us that, ultimately, shocks this severe profoundly alter the character of society.Don Peck’s Pinched, a fascinating and harrowing exploration of ou...

A blueprint for a national leadership movement to transform the way the public thinks about givingVirtually everything our society has been taught about charity is backwards. We deny the social sector the ability to grow because of our short-sighted demand that it send every short-term dollar into direct services. Yet if the sector cannot grow, it can never match the scale of our great social problems. In the face of this dilemma, the sector has remained silent, de...

Ralph Nader has fought for over fifty years on behalf of American citizens against the reckless influence of corporations and their government patrons on our society. Now he ramps up the fight and makes a persuasive case that Americans are not powerless. In Unstoppable, he explores the emerging political alignment of the Left and the Right against converging corporate-government tyranny.Large segments from the progressive, conservative, and libertarian political camps find...

From the intellectual leader of the Republican party, an unvarnished look into the state of the conservative movement today and a clear plan for what needs to be done to save the American Idea.The Way Forward challenges conventional thinking, outlines his political vision for 2014 and beyond, and shows how essential conservatism is for the future of our nation.Beginning with a careful analysis of the 2012 election--including a look at the challenge t...

New York Times –Bestseller: "A thinking person's primer for a conservative politics of human flourishing." —George F. Will, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Conservative SensibilityArthur C. Brooks, one of the country's leading policy experts and a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, offers a bold new vision for conservatism as a movement for happiness, unity, and social justice—a movement of the head and hea...

An inside look at the secretive world of elite philanthropists--and how they're quietly wielding ever more power to shape American life in ways both good and bad.While media attention focuses on famous philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Charles Koch, thousands of donors are at work below the radar promoting a wide range of causes. David Callahan charts the rise of these new power players and the ways they are converting the fortunes of a second Gilded Age into ...

In 2004, Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, the world's leading foundation for entrepreneurship, published a groundbreaking essay with a radical premise: that Americans literally have no conception of the secret that truly underlies our economic success, and that for the United States to survive and continue to lead the world's economy, it is imperative we learn to understand and employ that secret.The secret that has led the American economy to become the world's ...

The headlines are getting more frequent -- the language, more inflammatory. A war between the generations. The greedy boomers refusing to get out of the way. The hapless millennials struggling to find a footing. A crisis in pensions. A crisis in jobs. A crisis in health care ... But is that the true story? In this provocative new book, David Cravit, author of The New Old, dissects the apparent war -- and comes to some surprising conclusions:Yes, there are intergenera...

America seems to be on a downward slide. Our government spends too much, our economy creates too little, and we aren't preparing our children to compete in a global marketplace. Yet our politicians—Republican and Democrat alike—just don't get it. While once-great cities fall into decay, Washington thrives, living off the hard work and tax dollars of the private sector. It's time for an American comeback—and it starts with innovation.Throughout its history, America's great innovators...