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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Advanced Placement (AP) program. Advanced Placement is a privately operated, mostly privately financed, and almost entirely voluntary curricular option for high schools and their teachers and students—one that has been competently managed and adroitly led by the nonprofit, nonpartisan College Board. It has mostly avoided the politics and fads that roil contemporary American public education, even as it has gradually evolved into a significant player in the longest-running and most compelling reform impulse of all: to widen educational opportunity and foster upward mobility for disadvantaged youngsters. For several decades after its founding in the mid-twentieth century, AP was a modest venture—scarcely visible on the K–12 scene—which conferred extra advantages on a relative handful of already-fortunate kids attending a short list of exclusive private and posh suburban public high schools. Today, however, AP's profile is far higher and markedly different: A host of policies, auxiliary programs, and booster organizations have widened access to it. Not only is its scale vastly greater, its cadres are also much more diverse, both demographically and geographically, and it is being deployed strategically in many places to strengthen the secondary schooling and postsecondary prospects of poor and minority youngsters who long lacked access to high-level coursework.

Education contributes powerfully to better health and public education is a foundation for democracy. Recently, however, private capital has viewed education as a profit center that can replace revenues lost to the decline of manufacturing. This chapter analyses the ways that modern capitalism has undermined equitable access to quality early childcare, K-12 education, and college by privatizing public education, creating and mandating expensive and inadequately tested but profitable educational tests, technologies and products, and imposing debt on schools and students. A powerful lobby of wealthy individuals and corporate leaders have used their influence to promote market values within the school system. These changes undercut the health- and equity-enhancing characteristics of public education. The chapter also describes how students, parents, teachers, and communities are resisting corporate penetration of public education, rejecting the ways it reinforces systemic racism, and creating models for education that promote health, democracy, and collective success.

This chapter explains how citizen science can foster true inquiry in the classroom, with particular emphasis on K–12 education. It considers how citizen science can be used by teachers to help their students pose their own questions, thus bringing personal relevance and meaning to student research, inspiring interest and motivation to learn. It also discusses curricular support for inquiry in citizen science, citing as an example the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's BirdSleuth curriculum that was designed to support student participation in citizen science projects. Finally, it describes a range of materials and opportunities provided by citizen science projects in support of inquiry-based learning, including data displays and analysis tools, teacher professional development, and mentoring by scientists.

Standards-based education reform efforts that began in the 1990s resulted in social studies standards by grade level in every single state, stretching from kindergarten to grade 12. All of these standards single out history as a separate subject or strand, and many include world history as a subset within history as a whole. These standards are highly variable, idiosyncratic, and sometimes error-ridden, and they have been the source of enormous controversy. Some world history standards are completely skills-based, with only one sentence about content, and many are very Eurocentric, especially in the lists of individuals and events students should know. Recent efforts to develop better standards, such as the C3 Framework, have become embroiled in the controversy over Common Core, but because high-stakes testing is often based on state standards, world historians should get involved in improving them, and advocate for better world history teaching.

Civic engagement and service learning are now part of mainstream American education, but such programs are normally embedded in hierarchical, rule-bound, and inegalitarian institutions. Even while called to service outside, most students are excluded from meaningfully shaping the social environment inside their schools. This chapter examines schools embracing a different model. Democratic schools involve students in curriculum design, teaching, and institutional governance. Regular all-school advisory meetings, student-led inquiry, peer juries, and other forms of participatory conflict resolution are common in these schools. Historically linked to progressive education reforms and to student power efforts in the 1960s, contemporary democratic innovators in mainstream K-12 education are motivated by three factors seen as under threat: professional identity, academic engagement, and genuine civic education. Drawing on interviews with teachers and principals working in democratic schools across different regions, this chapter describes barriers to growth as well as available resources for sustaining long-term reform.

This chapter makes the case for what and how we should teach about media in K-12 schools and universities. The author takes a measured approach, advocating the teaching of both traditional media criticism as well as Web 2.0 skills related to content creation and participation. Further, Buckingham urges educators to resist what he calls “techno-fetishism,” or celebrating technology in education for its own sake. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that educators who do not participate in new media culture risk losing the so-called “right to teach” by living in a different society than that of their students.

This chapter examines the effects of undocumented immigration on local and state economies as well as the objections to immigration often made at the state or local level. It first reviews studies on the local impact of immigration, including the 1997–1998 National Research Council report, before discussing the notion that healthcare and K-12 education for undocumented immigrants and their families impose increased costs on state and local economies. It then considers efforts by state and local governments to implement immigration policy, such as the DREAM Act. The chapter concludes with a proposal aimed at easing the effects of undocumented immigration on states and local economies.

In this chapter, principals and teachers talk about the new changes in school education, pedagogy, and curriculum; it discusses what they understand about them and how they are implementing the phenomenon-based and integrative learning ideas. Principals and teachers talk about the future of school education as well. They address how Finland is changing in education; how they are changing; how they are implementing the new curricula; and what they like and do not like about the new paths. The chapter also shows—through the lens of 14 case studies—the new learning environments in the twenty-first century from the architectural, pedagogical, and digital points of view. The 14 school stories might show a future of education in the world’s schools. The chapter divides the narrative of visits to schools into two main sections, background and interview. For most schools, there are more sections as the information provided by principals and teachers allowed describing in greater detail the learning environments in each school.