Overturns common misconceptions about charter schools, school "choice," standardized tests, common core curriculum, and teacher evaluations.Three distinguished educators, scholars, and activists flip the script on many enduring and popular myths about teachers, teachers' unions, and education that permeate our culture. By unpacking these myths, and underscoring the necessity of strong and vital public schools as a common good, the authors challenge readers--whether...

Being Bad will change the way you think about the social and academic worlds of Black boys. In a poignant and harrowing journey from systems of education to systems of criminal justice, the author follows her brother, Chris, who has been designated a “bad kid” by his school, a “person of interest” by the police, and a “gangster” by society. Readers first meet Chris in a Chicago jail, where he is being held in connection with a string of street robberies. We then learn about Chris ...

Inspired by the life and work of Bill Ayers—particularly his advice to “teach into the contradiction”—Diving In reflects the intellectual adventures that Ayers has always encouraged those around him to undertake. Written by leading educators and activists, the collected chapters within this book are as diverse as the myriad contradictions that teachers encounter in their day-to-day practice and their out-of-class musings. The contributors use themes suggest...

The life journey of the president and CEO of FJ Management, Inc.—from growing up as the daughter of two entrepreneurs to saving the family business.Discover the inspiring story of how Crystal Maggelet unexpectedly ended up as CEO of her father's company, guiding Flying J back from bankruptcy and on to great success—all during the throes of the Great Recession of the late 2000s. Through it all, Crystal succeeded by maintaining the core philosophy handed down through ...

A field-tested, classroom-based approach for developing the critical thinking, social-emotional, problem-solving, and discussion skills students need to be good citizens and effective changemakers.We often hear that a key purpose of schooling is to prepare students for informed and active citizenship. But what does this look like in practice? How do teachers pursue this goal amid other pressing priorities, including student mastery of both academic content and soci...

Love songs and Hollywood romances make it all sound so simple: You find your soul mate, move in together, get married, never stray from the path of monogamy, and live happily ever after. But real life tends to be more complicated. Many couples pursue alternative living arrangements, and some even pursue alternative loving arrangements.The twenty-nine personal essays in this collection offer a variety of perspectives and experiences with nontraditional relationships and forms of coh...

Compared to much of the rest of the world, America and its citizens are rich. But many people are also deeply miserable—at work, at home, or both. In this provocative book, author John Brueggemann unpacks why so many people are struggling, both emotionally and financially, in a nation that looks so prosperous on the surface. From a hospital patient reduced to a balance sheet to a parent working such long hours that he misses dinner, Brueggemann argues that market thinking has permeated eve...

While teaching at an all-Black middle school in Atlanta, Levinson realized that her students’ individual self-improvement would not necessarily enable them to overcome their historical marginalization. In order to overcome their civic empowerment gap, students must learn how to reshape power relationships through public political and civic action.

What does it mean to "act black" or "act white"? Is race merely a matter of phenotype, or does it come from the inflection of a person's speech, the clothes in her closet, how she chooses to spend her time and with whom she chooses to spend it? What does it mean to be "really" black, and who gets to make that judgment? In Acting White?, leading scholars of race and the law Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati argue that, in spite of decades of racial progress and the pervasiveness of multicultura...

Critics often warn that American schools are failing, and that our students are ill-prepared for the challenges the future holds, and may even be "the dumbest generation." We can think of these claims as warning about a Stupidity Epidemic. This essay begins by tracing the history of the idea of that American students, teachers, and schools are somehow getting worse; the record shows that critics have been issuing such warnings for more than 150 years. It then examines four sets of data tha...

Very high rates of family fragmentation in the United States are subtracting from what very large numbers of students are learning in school and forever holding them back in many other ways. This in turn is damaging the country economically by making us less primed for innovation while also making millions of Americans less competitive in an increasingly demanding worldwide marketplace. All of which is leading – and can only lead – to deepening class divisions in a nation which has never v...

"Teaching Toward Democracy" examines the contested space of schooling and school reform with a focus on the unique challenges and opportunities that teaching in a democratic society provides. Teaching in and for democracy involves developing particular qualities of mind that teachers explore and work to develop as they become more effective educators. Some chapters open with familiar experiences in the lives of teachers in schools (working with parents and communities, or dealing with clas...