Education

Teacher and author Vivian Paley is highly regarded by parents, educators, and other professionals for her original insights into such seemingly everyday issues as play, story, gender, and how young children think. This book takes a synoptic view of Paley's many books and articles, charting the evolution of Paley's thinking while revealing the seminal characteristics of her teaching philosophy. This analysis leads the text to identify a pedagogical model organized around two complementary principles: a curriculum that promotes play and imagination, and the idea of classrooms as fair places where young children of every color, ability, and disposition are welcome.

Aspiring college students and their families have many options. A student can attend an in-state or an out-of-state school, a public or private college, a two-year community college program or a four-year university program. Students can attend full time and have a bachelor of arts degree by the age of twenty-three or mix college and work, progressing toward a degree more slowly. To make matters more complicated, the array of financial aid available is more complex than ever. Students and their families must weigh federal grants, state merit scholarships, college tax credits, and college savings accounts, to name just a few. This book shows how students and their families really make college decisions—how they respond to financial aid options, how peer relationships figure in the decision-making process, and even whether they need mentoring to get through the admissions process. Students of all sorts are considered—from poor students, who may struggle with applications and with deciding whether to continue on to college, to high-aptitude students who are offered “free rides” at elite schools. The book utilizes the best methods and latest data to analyze the college decision-making process, while explaining how changes in aid and admissions practices inform those decisions as well.

Students in special education programs can have widely divergent experiences. For some, special education amounts to a dumping ground where schools unload their problem students, while for others, it provides access to services and accommodations that drastically improve chances of succeeding in school and beyond. This book argues that this inequity in treatment is directly linked to the disparity in resources possessed by the students' parents. Since the mid-1970s, federal law has empowered parents of public school children to intervene in virtually every aspect of the decision making involved in special education. However, this book reveals that this power is generally available only to those parents with the money, educational background, and confidence needed to make effective claims about their children's disabilities and related needs. The author documents this class divide by examining evidence including historic rates of learning disability diagnosis, court decisions, and advice literature for parents of disabled children. In an era of expanding special education enrollment, the book provides an analysis of the way this expansion has created new kinds of inequality.

Math and science hold powerful places in contemporary society, setting the foundations for entry into some of the most robust and highest-paying industries. However, effective math and science education is not equally available to all students, with some of the poorest students—those who would benefit most—going egregiously underserved. This ongoing problem with education highlights one of the core causes of the widening class gap. While this educational inequality can be attributed to a number of economic and political causes, this book demonstrates that it is augmented by a consistent failure to integrate student history, culture, and social needs into the core curriculum. The chapters argue that teachers and schools should create hybrid third spaces—neither classroom nor home—in which underserved students can merge their personal worlds with those of math and science. A host of examples buttress this argument: schools where these spaces have been instituted now provide students with not only an immediate motivation to engage the subjects most critical to their future livelihoods but also the broader math and science literacy necessary for robust societal engagement. The book pushes beyond the idea of teaching for social justice and into larger questions of how and why students participate in math and science.

A little-discussed aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a mandate that requires failing schools to hire after-school tutoring companies—the largest of which are private, for-profit corporations—and to pay them with federal funds. This book takes a hard look at the implications of this new blurring of the boundaries between government, schools, and commerce in New York City, the country's largest school district. As it explains, NCLB—a federally legislated, state-regulated, district-administered, and school-applied policy—explicitly legitimizes giving private organizations significant roles in public education. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book finds that the results are political, problematic, and highly profitable. Bringing to light these unproven, unregulated private companies' almost invisible partnership with the government, it lays bare the unintended consequences of federal efforts to eliminate school failure—not the least of which is more failure.

It is one thing to lament the financial pressures put on universities, quite another to face up to the poverty of resources for thinking about what universities should do when they purport to offer a liberal education. This book enriches those resources by proposing fresh ways to think about liberal learning with ideas more suited to our times. It does so by defining basic values of modernity and then considering curricular principles pertinent to them. The principles the book favors are powers of the mind—disciplines understood as fields of study defined not by subject matter but by their embodiment of distinct intellectual capacities. To illustrate, the book draws on a lifetime of teaching and educational leadership, while providing a summary of exemplary educational thinkers at the University of Chicago who continue to inspire. Out of this vital tradition, the book constructs a paradigm for liberal arts today, inclusive of all perspectives and applicable to all settings in the modern world.

Middle- and upper-middle-class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds. Most attempts to redress this inequality focus on the issue of access to financial resources, but as this book makes clear, the problem goes beyond mere economics. The book examines a typical suburban American high school to explain how some students get ahead. The book's author undertook four years of research at a Midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives students to advance. The book reveals the many ways the community's ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethics and employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; and administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students “valedictorians.” Yet, as the book shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress and fatigue, incivility and vandalism, and the alienation of the less successful.

America's public universities educate 80% of the nation's college students. But in the wake of rising demands on state treasuries, changing demographics, growing income inequality, and legislative indifference, many of these institutions have fallen into decline. Tuition costs have skyrocketed, class sizes have gone up, the number of courses offered has gone down, and the overall quality of education has decreased significantly. This book draws on the author's years of experience as a professor, administrator, and university president to argue that a new compact between state government and public universities is needed to make these schools more affordable and financially secure. The book challenges a change-resistant culture in academia that places too low a premium on efficiency and productivity. Seeing a crisis of campus leadership, the book takes state legislators to task for perpetuating the decay of their public university systems and calls for reforms in the way university presidents and governing boards are selected. It concludes that the era is long past when state appropriations can enable public universities to keep their fees low and affordable. The book thus calls for the partial deregulation of public universities and a phase-out of their state appropriations. The plan outlined in this book would tie university revenues to their performance and exploit the competitive pressures of the academic marketplace to control costs, rein in tuition, and make schools more responsive to student needs.

When we think about school principals, most of us imagine a figure of vague, yet intimidating authority—for an elementary school student, being sent to the principal's office is roughly on par with a trip to Orwell's Room 101. But this book aims to change that. The book offers an intensive and detailed look at principals, painting a portrait of what they do, how they do it, and why. It begins with a brief history of the job before turning to the daily work of a principal. These men and women, the book finds, stand at the center of a constellation of competing interests around and within the school. School district officials, teachers, parents, and students all have needs and demands that frequently clash, and it is the principal's job to manage these conflicting expectations to best serve the public. Unsurprisingly then, the book records its subjects' professional dissatisfactions, but it also depicts the pleasures of their work and the pride they take in their accomplishments. Finally, the book offers a glimpse of the future with an analysis of current issues and trends in education, including the increasing presence of women in the role and the effects of widespread testing mandated by the government.

The problems commonly associated with inner-city schools were not nearly as pervasive a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. This history of race and urban education tells the story of how and why these schools came to serve black children so much worse than their white counterparts. Focusing on Chicago public schools between 1900 and 1960, it compares the circumstances of blacks and white immigrants, groups that had similarly little wealth and status yet came to gain vastly different benefits from their education. Their divergent educational outcomes, the author contends, stemmed from Chicago officials' decision to deal with rising African American migration by segregating schools and denying black students equal resources. The book shows that this divergence deepened because of techniques for managing academic failure that only reinforced inequality. Ultimately, these tactics eroded the legitimacy of the schools in Chicago's black community, leaving educators unable to help its most disadvantaged students.