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An exploration of how Edmund Perry, a 17 year old black honors student from Harlem, was killed soon after graduation by a young white plain clothes policeman in an alleged mugging attempt.

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To celebrate the 25th anniversary of its publication, Michael W. Apple has thoroughly updated his influential text, and written a new preface. The new edition also includes an extended interview circa 2001, in which Apple relates the critical agenda outlined in Ideology and Curriculum to the more contemporary conservative climate. Finally, a new chapter titled "Pedagogy, Patriotism and Democracy: Ideology and Education After 9/11" is also included.

This third edition of Official Knowledge, a classic text from one of education’s most distinguished scholars, challenges readers to critically examine how certain knowledge comes to be “official,” and whose agendas this knowledge represents. A probing and award-winning study, this new edition builds on the tradition of its predecessors to question the rightist resurgence in education while substantive updates throughout show how such policies continue to define our commonsense notions about what counts as a good school. As insightful as it is thorough, Official Knowledge is a refreshing call to challenge the dominant forces within education today, as Apple powerfully illustrates how larger social movements are only possible if we purposefully and inclusively deepen our understanding of the existing body of knowledge about education.

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The first book to offer a systematic look at the significance of postmodernist ideas for education. “In Postmodern Education Aronowitz and Giroux are architects of the imagination, presenting essays of political, social, and cultural criticism aimed at altering the ways we understand the existing social order and act to change the conditions of our lives.” --Afterimage

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In the first book to present the history of Baltimore school desegregation, Howell S. Baum shows how good intentions got stuck on what Gunnar Myrdal called the "American Dilemma." Immediately after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the city's liberal school board voted to desegregate and adopted a free choice policy that made integration voluntary. From the classroom to city hall, Baum examines how Baltimore's distinct identity as a border city between North and South shaped local conversations about the national conflict over race and equality. The city's history of wrestling with the legacy of Brown reveals Americans' preferred way of dealing with racial issues: not talking about race. This avoidance, Baum concludes, allows segregation to continue.

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In a masterly commentary on the possibilities of education, the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner reveals how education can usher children into their culture, though it often fails to do so. Applying the newly emerging "cultural psychology" to education, Bruner proposes that the mind reaches its full potential only through participation in the culture—not just its more formal arts and sciences, but its ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and carrying out discourse. By examining both educational practice and educational theory, Bruner explores new and rich ways of approaching many of the classical problems that perplex educators. Going well beyond his earlier acclaimed books on education, Bruner looks past the issue of achieving individual competence to the question of how education equips individuals to participate in the culture on which life and livelihood depend. Educators, psychologists, and students of mind and culture will find in this volume an unsettling criticism that challenges our current conventional practices—as well as a wise vision that charts a direction for the future.

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In this classic argument for curriculum reform in early education, Jerome Bruner shows that the basic concepts of science and the humanities can be grasped intuitively at a very early age. He argues persuasively that curricula should he designed to foster such early intuitions and then build on them in increasingly formal and abstract ways as education progresses. Bruner’s foundational case for the spiral curriculum has influenced a generation of educators and will continue to be a source of insight into the goals and methods of the educational process.

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In this new volume the subjects dealt with in The Process of Education are pursued further, probed more deeply, given concrete illustration and a broader context. The theories presented are anchored in practice, in the empirical research from which they derive and in the practical applications to which they can be put. The latter are exemplified incidentally throughout and extensively in detailed descriptions of two courses Mr. Bruner has helped to construct and to teach—an experimental mathematics course and a multifaceted course in social studies. Written with all the style and élan that readers have come to expect of Mr. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction is charged with the provocative suggestions and inquiries of one of the great innovators in the field of education.

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While the achievement gap has dominated policy discussions over the past two decades, relatively little attention has been paid to a gap even more at odds with American ideals: the opportunity gap. Opportunity and achievement, while inextricably connected, are very different goals. In communities across the U.S., children lack the crucial resources and opportunities, inside and outside of schools that they need if they are to reach their potential. Closing the Opportunity Gap offers accessible, research-based essays written by top experts who highlight the discrepancies that exist in our public schools, focusing on how policy decisions and life circumstances conspire to create the "opportunity gap" that leads inexorably to stark achievement gaps. 

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In Democracy and Education, Dewey argues that the primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of education. On one hand, there is the contrast between the immaturity of the new-born members of the group (its future sole representatives) and the maturity of the adult members who possess the knowledge and customs of the group. On the other hand, there is the necessity that these immature members be not merely physically preserved in adequate numbers, but that they be initiated into the interests, purposes, information, skill, and practices of the mature members: otherwise the group will cease its characteristic life.

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Experience and Education is the best concise statement on education ever published by John Dewey, the man acknowledged to be the pre-eminent educational theorist of the twentieth century. Written more than two decades after Democracy and Education(Dewey's most comprehensive statement of his position in educational philosophy), this book demonstrates how Dewey reformulated his ideas as a result of his intervening experience with the progressive schools and in the light of the criticisms his theories had received. 

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In this collection, Reginald D. Archambault has assembled John Dewey's major writings on education. He has also included basic statements of Dewey's philosophic position that are relevant to understanding his educational views. These selections are useful not only for understanding Dewey's pedagogical principles, but for illustrating the important relation between his educational theory and the principles of his general philosophy.
 

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Learning to Labor in New Times foregrounds nine essays which re-examine the work of noted sociologist Paul Willis, 25 years after the publication of his seminal Learning to Labor, one of the most frequently cited and assigned texts in the cultural studies and social foundations of education.

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In Whither Opportunity? a distinguished team of economists, sociologists, and experts in social and education policy examines the corrosive effects of unequal family resources, disadvantaged neighborhoods, insecure labor markets, and worsening school conditions on K-12 education. This groundbreaking book illuminates the ways rising inequality is undermining the ability of schools to provide children with an equal chance at academic and economic success.Whither Opportunity? shows that from earliest childhood, parental investments in children s learning affect reading, math, and other attainments later in life. For generations of Americans, public education provided the springboard to upward mobility. This pioneering volume casts a stark light on the ways rising inequality may now be compromising schools functioning, and with it the promise of equal opportunity in America.

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I think this is the most important work I have read in over a decade on the sociology and politics of school dropouts. Fine combines a narrative structure with a rigorous theoretical discourse that allows the reader to both hear the voices of those involved in the dropout situation as well as to have the opportunity to reflect critically on the ideological and material forces that structure the dropout issue as a social problem. I am convinced that it will be a major influence in the field and will establish a new theoretical standard for inquiry into the area of school dropouts." — Henry A. Giroux, Professor and Renown Scholar in Residence, Department of Educational Leadership, Miami University

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The internationally acclaimed children’s book writer and educator offers her insights into the learning process, language education, and the pleasure, growth, and power that reading and writing can bring.The author states her opinion, reinforced with personal anecdotes, that the basal readers and activities sheets widely used in reading schemes are harmful to children's acquisition of reading and writing skills. A whole language' approach, based on children reading and writing about topics which really matter to them, is argued. The author of the bestselling Possum Magic' draws on her own writings and experience as a parent and as a lecturer in language arts. Includes a bibliography.

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This book displays the striking creativity and profound insight that characterized Freire's work to the very end of his life-an uplifting and provocative exploration not only for educators, but also for all that learn and live.

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First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm. With a substantive new introduction on Freire's life and the remarkable impact of this book by writer and Freire confidant and authority Donaldo Macedo, this anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.

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In Teachers as Cultural Workers, Freire speaks directly to teachers about the lessons learned from a lifetime of experience as an educator and social theorist. No other book so cogently explains the implications for classroom practice of Freire’s latest ideas and the pathbreaking theories found in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and other treatises. This book challenges all who teach to reflect critically on the meaning of the act of teaching as well as the meaning of learning. Freire shows why a teacher’s success depends on a permanent commitment to learning and training, as part of an ongoing appraisal of classroom practice.  When teachers open themselves to recognize the different roads students take in order to learn, they will become involved in a continual reconstruction of their own paths of curiosity, opening the doors to habits of learning that will benefit everyone in the classroom.

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In an age where terms such as 'hard-to-teach,' and 'at-risk' beset our pedagogical discourses, where students have grown up in systems plagued by anti-immigrant, anti-welfare, 'zero-tolerance' rhetoric, how we frame and understand the dynamics of classrooms has serious ethical implications and powerful consequences. Using theatre and drama education as a special window into school life in four urban secondary schools in Toronto and New York City, The Theatre of Urban examines the ways in which these schools reflect the cultural and political shifts in big city North American schooling policies, politics, and practices of the early twenty-first century.< The Theatre of Urban not only explores the very notion of performance in a novel and interesting way, it also provides new insights into the conflicts that often erupt in these highly charged school spaces.

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THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION is a freewheeling investigation into the real - as opposed to the `official' - history of schooling, focused on the U.S. but with examinations of other historical examples for the purposes of comparing and contrasting, as well as for tracing where ideas and concepts related to education originated. You will discover things you were never told in the official version, things that will, at times, surprise, disgust, and scare you. You will also be introduced to the little-known historiography of the the darker side of the construction of compulsory government schooling.

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Arguing that too many capable students make little or no effort to learn, the author advocates the use of control theory for a productive classroom model of team learning with emphasis on satisfaction and excitement.

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In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change. The Teacher Wars upends the conversation about American education by bringing the lessons of history to bear on the dilemmas we confront today. By asking “How did we get here?” Dana Goldstein brilliantly illuminates the path forward.

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A third report from a Study of High Schools, co-sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the National Association of Independent Schools. Robert Hampel describes the sweeping transformation of secondary school education that occurred over the forty-five years prior to his publishing this book in 1986. How it all changed, from a regimented institution where formal manners prevailed and fun was extracurricular--the world of "the last little citadel"--to the laissez-faire campuses of today, is the focus of this book. It is a fascinating piece of social and intellectual history.

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In Teaching to Transgress,bell hooks—writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual—writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom.  Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal. bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom? Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. 

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Richard Ingersoll reveals the shortcomings in the two opposing viewpoints that dominate thought on this subject: that schools are too decentralized and lack adequate control and accountability; and that schools are too centralized, giving teachers too little autonomy. Both views, he shows, overlook one of the most important parts of teachers' work: schools are not simply organizations engineered to deliver academic instruction to students, as measured by test scores; schools and teachers also play a large part in the social and behavioral development of our children. As a result, both views overlook the power of implicit social controls in schools that are virtually invisible to outsiders but keenly felt by insiders.

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A conservative, bipartisan consensus dominates the discussion about what’s wrong with our schools and how to fix them. It offers “solutions” that scapegoat teachers, vilify unions, and impose a market mentality. But in each case, students lose. This book, written by teacher-activists, speaks back to that elite consensus and offers an alternative vision of learning for liberation.

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No Contest stands as the definitive critique of competition. Contrary to accepted wisdom, competition is not basic to human nature; it poisons our relationships and holds us back from doing our best. In this new edition, Alfie Kohn argues that the race to win turns all of us into losers.

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The basic strategy we use for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train a family pet. The quick fix of rewards may seem to be effective, but manipulating people with external incentives actually kills their interest in what they are doing and lowers the quality of their work. Indeed, Kohn shows that the decline in our workplaces and classrooms may be related to our acceptance of a theory of motivation derived from lab animals. Drawing on a wealth of psychological research, he points the way to a more successful strategy based on working with people instead of doing things to them. "Do rewards motivate people?" asks Kohn. "Yes. They motivate people to get rewards." Seasoned with humor and familiar examples, Punished By Rewards presents an argument unsettling to hear but impossible to dismiss.