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...

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...

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...

**A handbook for how political power really works, and what it takes to make change happen“[Liu] addresses a central question of this age: what, exactly, citizens who are unhappy with national politics can do, other than write a check or await the next chance to vote.” —The Atlantic**In this age of epic political turbulence, citizens everywhere are organizing to claim their power. Do you understand what power truly is, how it flows, who has it, and how you can exer...

Across the US, cities and metropolitan areas are facing huge economic and competitive challenges that Washington won't, or can't, solve. The good news is that networks of metropolitan leaders mayors, business and labor leaders, educators, and philanthropists are stepping up and powering the nation forward. These state and local leaders are doing the hard work to grow more jobs and make their communities more prosperous, and they're investing in infrastructure, making manufacturing a pr...

How government can forge dynamic public-private partnershipsAll too often government lacks the skill, the will, and the wallet to meet its missions. Schools fall short of the mark while roads and bridges fall into disrepair. Health care costs too much and delivers too little. Budgets bleed red ink as the cost of services citizens want outstrips the taxes they are willing to pay. Collaborative Governance is the first book to offer solutions by demonstrating ...

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.Co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, David Morris describes the growing tension between the globalization of economies and the localization of politics, between our role as consumers and our role as citizens. He suggests that the resolution of this tension lies in Schumacher‘s call for local production for local consump...