On the surface, law schools today are thriving. Enrollments are on the rise, and their resources are often the envy of every other university department. Law professors are among the highest paid and play key roles as public intellectuals, advisers, and government officials. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession.
Addressing all these problems and more in a ringing critique is renowned legal scholar Brian Z. Tamanaha. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis and the likely consequences if the current trend continues. The out-of-pocket cost of obtaining a law degree at many schools now approaches $200,000. The average law school graduate’s debt is around $100,000—the highest it has ever been—while the legal job market is the worst in decades, with the scarce jobs offering starting salaries well below what is needed to handle such a debt load. At the heart of the problem, Tamanaha argues, are the economic demands and competitive pressures on law schools—driven by competition over U.S. News and World Report ranking. When paired with a lack of regulatory oversight, the work environment of professors, the limited information available to prospective students, and loan-based tuition financing, the result is a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.
Growing concern with the crisis in legal education has led to high-profile coverage in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and many observers expect it soon will be the focus of congressional scrutiny. Bringing to the table his years of experience from within the legal academy, Tamanaha has provided the perfect resource for assessing what’s wrong with law schools and figuring out how to fix them.
A Science “Reading List for Uncertain Times” Selection
“A must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in the present and future of higher education.”
—Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Lower Ed
“A must-read for the education-invested as well as the education-interested.”
—Forbes
Proponents of massive online learning have promised that technology will radically accelerate learning and democratize education. Much-publicized experiments, often underwritten by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been launched at elite universities and elementary schools in the poorest neighborhoods. But a decade after the “year of the MOOC,” the promise of disruption seems premature.
In Failure to Disrupt, Justin Reich takes us on a tour of MOOCs, autograders, “intelligent tutors,” and other edtech platforms and delivers a sobering report card. Institutions and investors favor programs that scale up quickly at the expense of true innovation. Learning technologies—even those that are free—do little to combat the growing inequality in education. Technology is a phenomenal tool in the right hands, but no killer app will shortcut the hard road of institutional change.
“I’m not sure if Reich is as famous outside of learning science and online education circles as he is inside. He should be…Reading and talking about Failure to Disrupt should be a prerequisite for any big institutional learning technology initiatives coming out of COVID-19.”
—Inside Higher Ed
“The desire to educate students well using online tools and platforms is more pressing than ever. But as Justin Reich illustrates…many recent technologies that were expected to radically change schooling have instead been used in ways that perpetuate existing systems and their attendant inequalities.”
—Science
Faith and the Historian collects essays from eight experienced historians discussing the impact of being "touched" by Catholicism on their vision of history. That first graduate seminar, these essays suggest, did not mark the inception of one's historical sensibilities; rather, that process had deeper, and earlier, roots. The authors--ranging from "cradle to the grave" Catholics to those who haven’t practiced for forty years, and everywhere in between--explicitly investigate the interplay between their personal lives and beliefs and the sources of their professional work. A variety of heartfelt, illuminating, and sometimes humorous experiences emerge from these stories of intelligent people coming to terms with their Catholic backgrounds as they mature and enter the academy. Contributors include: Philip Gleason, David Emmons, Maureen Fitzgerald, Joseph A. McCartin, Mario T. Garcia, Nick Salvatore, James R. Barrett, and Anne M. Butler.
Providing ways to engage students through their popular culture interests, this collection brings together several essays, across disciplines, to show how fan practices such as writing fan fiction, creating vids, communicating via Tumblr, and participating in film tourism can invite students to invest more of themselves into their education.
Both scholarship and fandom encourage passionate engagement with texts—rather than passive consumption in isolation— and editor Katherine Anderson Howell and her contributors find that when students are encouraged to partake in a remix classroom that encourages their fan interests, they participate more in their education, are more critical of experts and authorities, and actively shape the discourse themselves. Creating this remix classroom requires thoughtfulness on the instructor’s part, and so the chapters in this volume come from teachers who have carefully constructed such courses, including several invaluable appendices that provide examples of methodologies, course assignments, teaching practices, and classroom setup. Each chapter also includes student responses that offer a sense of what students gained from each course.
The result is an exciting and entertaining new way to motivate students and teachers alike, and it is sure to be a popular reference guide for instructors teaching classes from high school to graduate levels.
Over the past three decades, more than a quarter of a million children have become citizens of the United States through international adoption. Kindergarten teacher Jane Katch recently found herself with three such children in her class: Katya, born in Russia, Jasper, from Cambodia, and Caleb, from Romania. Each child had spent early years in an orphanage, and each had unique educational and emotional needs. How Katch came to recognize and respond to those needs makes up the journey of discovery in this moving and insightful book.
Interspersing vignettes from the classroom and conversations with the children’s parents, Far Away from the Tigers first explores Katch’s misunderstandings and mistakes as she struggles to help the children adjust to school. As Katch learns more about each child’s preadoption past, she gradually realizes that they were deprived of some basic learning experiences and she needs to find ways to fill those gaps. Before Caleb can learn to read or write, he must improve his verbal skills by learning nursery rhymes, stories, and songs. Katya, who came from an overcrowded orphanage, now needs to be the center of attention; before learning how to form real friendships, she first must gain control over more basic functions such as eating and sleeping. And the youngest, Jasper, needs steady encouragement to play with classmates instead of sitting alone practicing his handwriting.
Slowly, through trial and error and by drawing on the deep understanding and intense commitment of the children’s parents, Katch discovers the importance—and joy—of allowing each child time to develop in his or her own way. Beautifully told, wise, and candid, Far Away from the Tigers is a gift for parents, teachers, and anyone who cares for children growing up in a new home.
Claudia Zaslavsky has helped thousands of men and women understand why math made them miserable. Let her introduce you to real people who, like you, fled from anything to do with math. All of them--White, African American, Asian American, Latino, artist, homemaker, manager, teacher, teenager, or grandparent--came to see that their math troubles were not their fault. Social stereotypes, poor schools, and well-meaning parents had convinced them that they couldnÕt, or shouldnÕt, do math.
Claudia Zaslavsky shows you how the school math you dreaded is a far cry from the math you really need in life (and probably know better than you ever suspected)! She gives a host of reassuring methods, drawn from many cultures, for tackling real-world math problems. She explodes the myth that women and minorities are not good at math. With Claudia Zaslavsky’s help, you can see why math matters and how to get over the math barrier that has been holding you back from your goals in life.
In this unique collection, the editors and authors examine, against a rich historical background, the complex contributions that women have made to composition and rhetoric in American education. Using varied and at times experimental modes of presentation to portray teachers and learners at work, including the very young and the elderly, the text provides a generous and fresh feminine perspective on the field.
To contextualize a new and changed landscape for narratives in the history of rhetoric, Royster and Kirsch present four critical terms of engagement—critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization—as the foundation for a new analytical model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating feminist rhetorical inquiry and the study and teaching of rhetoric in general. This model draws directly on the wealth of knowledge and understanding gained from feminist rhetorical practices, especially sensitivity toward meaningfully and respectfully rendering the work, lives, cultures, and traditions of historical and contemporary women in rhetorical scholarship.
Proposing ambitious new standards for viewing and valuing excellence in feminist rhetorical practice, Royster and Kirsch advocate an ethos of respect and humility in the analysis of communities and specific rhetorical performances neglected in rhetorical history, recasting rhetorical studies as a global phenomenon rather than a western one. They also reflect on their own personal and professional development as researchers as they highlight innovative feminist research over the past thirty years to articulate how feminist work is changing the field and pointing to the active participation of women in various discourse arenas and to the practices and genres they use.
Valuable to new and established scholars of rhetoric, Feminist Rhetorical Practice: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies is essential for understanding the theoretical, methodological, and ethical impacts of feminist rhetorical studies on the wider field.
Winner, 2014 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award
In Field Seasons, Anna Marie Prentiss chronicles her experiences as an archaeologist, providing an insider’s look at the diverse cultures, personal agendas, and career pathways associated with American archaeology since the late twentieth century. As the narrative moves from her academic training to employment in government and private consulting to her eventual professorship at a state university, several themes emerge.
This book is about career paths. Its discussion of the diverse jobs within the archaeological profession makes it valuable to students seeking guidance about their career options. It also provides insight into the cultures of American archaeology, a discipline with many schools of thought and unique subcultures. The world of archaeological field technicians is quite different from that of government bureaucrats or academics. Prentiss also explores the elements of cultural change within archaeology while she reflects on her personal evolution throughout her thirty years within the discipline.
The book’s unique personal assessment of the state of American archaeology will appeal to a broad swath of students and professionals. Students will find it an entertaining road map to possible careers while professionals will find plenty of scholarly material concerning ethics, archaeological theory, and interpretations of the archaeological record.
Can a good school help its students overcome the adverse effects of economic disadvantage and family adversity? Recent educational assessment suggests that the answer may be a painful no. Here, however, is a book that contradicts the prevailing pessimism about the possibilities of education. In Fifteen Thousand Hours, Michael Rutter and his colleagues show conclusively that schools can make a difference.
In a three-year study of a dozen secondary schools in a large urban area, Rutter's team found that some schools were demonstrably better than others at promoting the academic and social success of their students. Moreover, there were clear and interesting differences between the schools that promote success and the schools that promote failure. As Rutter shows, these differences provide important clues to the kind of educational reform that might allow inner-city schools to act more uniformly as a positive and protective influence on students who must grow up in an otherwise disordered and difficult world.
For a dozen years during their formative period of development, children spend as many of their working hours at school as at home—some 15,000 hours in all. To suggest that this tremendous amount of time has no effect on development seems irrational. To settle for schools that simply act as institutions of containment for disadvantaged children seems a strategy of despair. The importance of this major book in education is its clear demonstration that these are not the only alternatives.
Much has been written about the Little Rock School Crisis of 1957, but very little has been devoted to the following year—the Lost Year, 1958–59—when Little Rock schools were closed to all students, both black and white. Finding the Lost Year is the first book to look at the unresolved elements of the school desegregation crisis and how it turned into a community crisis, when policymakers thwarted desegregation and challenged the creation of a racially integrated community and when competing groups staked out agendas that set Arkansas’s capital on a path that has played out for the past fifty years.
In Little Rock in 1958, 3,665 students were locked out of a free public education. Teachers’ lives were disrupted, but students’ lives were even more confused. Some were able to attend schools outside the city, some left the state, some joined the military, some took correspondence courses, but fully 50 percent of the black students went without any schooling. Drawing on personal interviews with over sixty former teachers and students, black and white, Gordy details the long-term consequences for students affected by events and circumstances over which they had little control.
“Fifty years ago segregationists trying to keep black students out of Little Rock Central High inadvertently broke up one of the country’s greatest football dynasties. . . . Wait a minute. . . . Who said you can’t have a high school football team just because you don’t have a high school? Canceling football, Faubus decreed, would be ‘a cruel and unnecessary blow to the children.’ O.K. then, everyone agreed. Play ball!”
—“Blinded by History,” Sports Illustrated
The third edition of First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student’s Guide to Teaching is designed to help new graduate student teaching assistants navigate the challenges of teaching undergraduates. Both a quick reference tool and a fluid read, the book focuses on the “how tos” of teaching, such as setting up a lesson plan, running a discussion, and grading, as well as issues specific to the teaching assistant’s unique role as both student and teacher.
This new edition incorporates newer teaching and learning pedagogy. The book has been updated to reflect the role of technology both inside and outside the classroom. In addition, a new chapter has been added that discusses successfully transitioning from being a teaching assistant to being hired as a full-time instructor.
Encountering Edward Said on Yom Kippur: Reflections on the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic is a fascinating and controversial collection of journals and meditations on the plight and possibility of the prophetic witness in the modern world. In these pages, the Jewish theologian, Marc H. Ellis, explores the prophetic through his encounters with the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, as a way of thinking through the stakes of contemporary Jewish history. His unexpected encounter with Said on Yom Kippur provides a fascinating window to explore the dangers and possibilities of present-day Jewish life and its future. Ellis applies Said’s idea of late-style to the Jewish prophetic – what Ellis names the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic – to mean the reappearance and coming home of the Jewish prophetic as it undergoes its own deconstruction and re-emergence. At turns deeply personal and creatively theoretical, Ellis doesn’t shy away from the forbidden terrains of self questioning and progressive posturing, even with people and movements he identifies with. The result is a sensitive and provocative exploration filled with questions and responses rather than definitive answers.
In (First Person)2, Day and Eodice offer one of the few book-length studies of co-authoring in academic fields since Lunsford and Ede published theirs over a decade ago. The central research here involves in-depth interviews with ten successful academic collaborators from a range of disciplines and settings. The interviews explore the narratives of these informants' experience—what brought them to collaborate, what cognitive and logistical processes were involved as they worked together, what is the status of collaborated work in their field, and so on—and situate these informants within the broader discussion of collaboration theory and research as it has been articulated over the last ten years.
As the study develops, Day and Eodice become most interested in the affective domain of co-authorship, and they find the most promising explorations of that domain in the work of feminist theorists in composition. Against a background of feminist theory, the reflections of these informants and authors not only provide a window into the processes of current scholarship in writing, but also come to stand as a critique of traditional practice in English departments. Throughout the book, the two co-authors interrupt themselves with reflections of their own, on the rejection long ago of their proposal to co-author a dissertation, on their presuppositions about their research, on their developing commitment to the framework of feminist theory to account for their findings, and on their own processes and challenges in writing this book. The result is a well-centered volume that is disciplined and restrained in its presentation of research, but which is layered and multivocal in presentation, and which ends with some provocative conclusions.
California is a state of immense contradictions. Home to colossal wealth and long portrayed as a bastion of opportunity, it also has one of the largest prison populations in the United States and consistently ranks on the bottom of education indexes. Taking a unique, multifaceted insider’s perspective, First Strike delves into the root causes of its ever-expansive prison system and disastrous educational policy.
Recentering analysis of Black masculinity beyond public rhetoric, First Strike critiques the trope of the “school-to-prison pipeline” and instead explores the realm of public school as a form of “enclosure” that has influenced the schooling (and denial of schooling) and imprisonment of Black people in California. Through a fascinating ethnography of a public school in Los Angeles County, and a “day in the life tour” of the effect of prisons on the education of Black youth, Damien M. Sojoyner looks at the contestation over education in the Black community from Reconstruction to the civil rights and Black liberation movements of the past three decades.
Policy makers, school districts, and local governments have long known that there is a relationship between high incarceration rates and school failure. First Strike is the first book that demonstrates why that connection exists and shows how school districts, cities and states have been complicit and can reverse a disturbing and needless trend. Rather than rely upon state-sponsored ideological or policy-driven models that do nothing more than to maintain structures of hierarchal domination, it allows us to resituate our framework of understanding and begin looking for solutions in spaces that are readily available and are immersed in radically democratic social visions of the future.
"First time up?"—an insider’s friendly question from 1960s counter-culture—perfectly captures the spirit of this book. A short, supportive, practical guide for the first-time college composition instructor, the book is upbeat, wise but friendly, casual but knowledgeable (like the voice that may have introduced you to certain other firsts). With an experiential focus rather than a theoretical one, First Time Up will be a strong addition to the newcomer’s professional library, and a great candidate for the TA practicum reading list.
Dethier, author of The Composition Instructor’s Survival Guide and From Dylan to Donne, directly addresses the common headaches, nightmares, and epiphanies of composition teaching—especially the ones that face the new teacher. And since legions of new college composition teachers are either graduate instructors (TAs) or adjuncts without a formal background in composition studies, he assumes these folks as his primary audience.
Dethier’s voice is casual, but it conveys concern, humor, experience, and reassurance to the first-timer. He addresses all major areas that graduate instructors or new adjuncts in a writing program are sure to face, from career anxiety to thoughts on grading and keeping good classroom records. Dethier’s own eclecticism is well-represented here, but he reviews with considerable deftness the value of contemporary scholarship to first-time writing instructors—many of whom will be impatient with high theory. Throughout the work, he affirms a humane, confident approach to teaching, along with a true affection for college students and for teachers just learning to deal with them.
“It was one of those periods that you got through, as opposed to enjoyed. It wasn’t an environment that . . . was nurturing, so you shut it out. You just got through it. You just took it a day at a time. You excelled if you could. You did your best. You felt as though the eyes of the community were on you.”—Glenda Wilson, East Side Junior High
Much has been written about the historical desegregation of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American students in 1957. History has been silent, however, about the students who desegregated Little Rock’s five public junior high schools—East Side, Forest Heights, Pulaski Heights, Southwest, and West Side—in 1961 and 1962.
The First Twenty-Five gathers the personal stories of these students some fifty years later. They recall what it was like to break down long-standing racial barriers while in their early teens—a developmental stage that often brings emotional vulnerability. In their own words, these individuals share what they saw, heard, and felt as children on the front lines of the civil rights movement, providing insight about this important time in Little Rock, and how these often painful events from their childhoods affected the rest of their lives.
Wild parties, late nights, and lots of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many assume these are the things that define an American teenager’s first year after high school. But the reality is really quite different. As Tim Clydesdale reports in The First Year Out, teenagers generally manage the increased responsibilities of everyday life immediately after graduation effectively. But, like many good things, this comes at a cost.
Tracking the daily lives of fifty young people making the transition to life after high school, Clydesdale reveals how teens settle into manageable patterns of substance use and sexual activity; how they meet the requirements of postsecondary education; and how they cope with new financial expectations. Most of them, we learn, handle the changes well because they make a priority of everyday life. But Clydesdale finds that teens also stow away their identities—religious, racial, political, or otherwise—during this period in exchange for acceptance into mainstream culture. This results in the absence of a long-range purpose for their lives and imposes limits on their desire to understand national politics and global issues, sometimes even affecting the ability to reconstruct their lives when tragedies occur.
The First Year Out is an invaluable resource for anyone caught up in the storm and stress of working with these young adults.
Through these chapters students are guided toward a working understanding of the field, learn basic terms and techniques, and learn to perceive the knowledge base and discourse frame for materials used in folklore courses. Folklore Rules will appeal to instructors and students for a variety of courses, including introductory folklore and comparative studies as well as literature, anthropology, and composition classes that include a folklore component.
Why teach about religion in public schools? What educational value can such courses potentially have for students?
In For the Civic Good, Walter Feinberg and Richard A. Layton offer an argument for the contribution of Bible and world religion electives. The authors argue that such courses can, if taught properly, promote an essential aim of public education: the construction of a civic public, where strangers engage with one another in building a common future. The humanities serve to awaken students to the significance of interpretive and analytic skills, and religion and Bible courses have the potential to add a reflective element to these skills. In so doing, students awaken to the fact of their own interpretive framework and how it influences their understanding of texts and practices. The argument of the book is developed by reports on the authors’ field research, a two-year period in which they observed religion courses taught in various public high schools throughout the country, from the “Bible Belt” to the suburban parkway. They document the problems in teaching religion courses in an educationally appropriate way, but also illustrate the argument for a humanities-based approach to religion by providing real classroom models of religion courses that advance the skills critical to the development of a civic public.
In 1811, deaf student Ferdinand Berthier commenced his education at the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris under its director Abbé Sicard and his teachers Auguste Bébian, Jean Massieu, and Laurent Clerc. Their tutelage eventually led Berthier to join the faculty at the Institute and become a life-long proponent of sign language and Deaf culture. Berthier earned fame for instituting the famous silent banquets in Paris in 1834. He also learned to advance his agenda by writing biographies of important figures who advocated sign over oralism to educate deaf French students. Forging Deaf Education in Nineteenth-Century France offers the first translation of Berthier’s biographical sketches of the four men above who influenced him most.
Berthier wrote first about Bébian in 1839, timed to advocate sign language for teaching deaf students after the death of the pro-oralism Institute Director Désiré Ordinaire. Berthier extolled Bébian’s linguistic acumen and his educational philosophy. In later sketches, however, he described Sicard and Massieu in positive terms, but also criticized them for supporting “methodical” signing that conformed to spoken language conventions. In contrast, he lauded Clerc in his portrayal for using “natural” signing to teach deaf students. The clarity of these translations will introduce a brand new audience to Berthier’s biographies shaped by his unswerving beliefs about Deaf French education.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, English literature, composition, and rhetoric were introduced almost simultaneously into colleges throughout the British cultural provinces. Professorships of rhetoric and belles lettres were established just as print was reaching a growing reading public and efforts were being made to standardize educated taste and usage. The provinces saw English studies as a means to upward social mobility through cultural assimilation. In the educational centers of England, however, the introduction of English represented a literacy crisis brought on by provincial institutions that had failed to maintain classical texts and learned languages.
Today, as rhetoric and composition have become reestablished in the humanities in American colleges, English studies are being broadly transformed by cultural studies, community literacies, and political controversies. Once again, English departments that are primarily departments of literature see these basic writing courses as a sign of a literacy crisis that is undermining the classics of literature. The Formation of College English reexamines the civic concerns of rhetoric and the politics that have shaped and continue to shape college English.
The largest unmet health need in this country—and potentially the most costly—is for dental care; meeting this need would strain existing personnel and facilities beyond capacity. This book reports an experiment in delivering dental care by means that are not traditional but preserve the high standards that have been achieved by American dentistry.
At the Forsyth Dental Center in Boston, Massachusetts, graduate dental hygienists received additional training in the administration of local anesthesia, drilling decayed teeth, and filling them. The program was designed to prepare dental auxiliaries to undertake restorative treatment under the direct supervision of a dentist who assumes ultimate responsibility for planning treatment, assessing the quality of performance, and assuring the patient's well-being.
The Forsyth experiment yielded information on the competence of auxiliaries trained in this fashion, on patient acceptance, on the efficiency of various patterns of practice, and on the potential economic effects of delivering care in this way. The results of the study are bound to stir controversy, but they cannot be ignored by anyone who cares about a major problem in health care.
In an insightful assessment of the study and teaching of writing against the larger theoretical, political, and technological upheavals of the past thirty years, Fragments of Rationality questions why composition studies has been less affected by postmodern theory than other humanities and social science disciplines.
In the spring of 1968, the English faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) voted to remedialize the first semester of its required freshman composition course, English 101. The following year, it eliminated outright the second semester course, English 102. For the next quarter-century, UW had no real campus-wide writing requirement, putting it out of step with its peer institutions and preventing it from fully joining the “composition revolution” of the 1970s. In From Form to Meaning, David Fleming chronicles these events, situating them against the backdrop of late 1960s student radicalism and within the wider changes taking place in U.S. higher education at the time.
Fleming begins with the founding of UW in 1848. He examines the rhetorical education provided in the university’s first half-century, the birth of a required, two semester composition course in 1898, faculty experimentation with that course in the 1920s and 1930s, and the rise of a massive “current-traditional” writing program, staffed primarily by graduate teaching assistants (TAs), after World War II. He then reveals how, starting around 1965, tensions between faculty and TAs concerning English 101-102 began to mount. By 1969, as the TAs were trying to take over the committee that supervised the course, the English faculty simply abandoned its long-standing commitment to freshman writing.
In telling the story of composition’s demise at UW, Fleming shows how contributing factors—the growing reliance on TAs; the questioning of traditional curricula by young instructors and their students; the disinterest of faculty in teaching and administering general education courses—were part of a larger shift affecting universities nationally. He also connects the events of this period to the long, embattled history of freshman composition in the United States. And he offers his own thoughts on the qualities of the course that have allowed it to survive and regenerate for over 125 years.
Today, over 75 percent of high school seniors aspire to graduate from college. However, only one-third of Americans hold a bachelor’s degree, and college graduation rates vary significantly by race/ethnicity and parental socioeconomic status. If most young adults aspire to obtain a college degree, why are these disparities so great? In From High School to College, Charles Hirschman analyzes the period between leaving high school and completing college for nearly 10,000 public and private school students across the Pacific Northwest.
Hirschman finds that although there are few gender, racial, or immigration-related disparities in students’ aspirations to attend and complete college, certain groups succeed at the highest rates. For example, he finds that women achieve better high school grades and report receiving more support and encouragement from family, peers, and educators. They tend to outperform men in terms of preparing for college, enrolling in college within a year of finishing high school, and completing a degree. Similarly, second-generation immigrants are better prepared for college than first-generation immigrants, in part because they do not have to face language barriers or learn how to navigate the American educational system.
Hirschman also documents that racial disparities in college graduation rates remain stark. In his sample, 35 percent of white students graduated from college within seven years of completing high school, compared to only 19 percent of black students and 18 percent of Hispanic students. Students’ socioeconomic origins—including parental education and employment, home ownership, and family structure—account for most of the college graduation gap between disadvantaged minorities and white students. Further, while a few Asian ethnic groups have achieved college completion rates on par with whites, such as Chinese and Koreans, others, whose socioeconomic origins more resemble those of black and Hispanic students, such as Filipinos and Cambodians, also lag behind in preparedness, enrollment, and graduation from college.
With a growing number of young adults seeking college degrees, understanding the barriers that different students encounter provides vital information for social scientists and educators. From High School to College illuminates how gender, immigration, and ethnicity influence the path to college graduation.
Since Margret A. Winzer wrote her landmark work The History of Special Education, much has transpired in this field, which she again has captured in a remarkable display of scholarship. Winzer’s new study From Integration to Inclusion: A History of Special Education in the 20th Century focuses chiefly on the significant events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States and Canada. Its key dynamics consist of a retrospective overview of the paradigms that emerged from and shaped special education; a critical assessment of past progress and reform, including failures and disappointments; and an analysis of the theoretical diversity within the discipline.
In this stand-alone volume, Winzer juxtaposes the historical study of disability and of special schooling and service provision with reference to broader social systems, protocols, and practices. She documents how prevailing emotional and intellectual climates influence disability and schooling, and also takes into account the social, political, and ideological factors that affect educational theory and practice. Winzer recognizes that reform has been the Zeitgeist of the history of special education. Crucial problems such as defining exceptional conditions and separating them from one another were formulated in contexts organized along moral, theological, legislative, medical, and social dimensions. Many of these reforms failed for various reasons, which Winzer thoroughly explains in her study. Most of these reforms evolved from the long and honorable pedigree that the field of special education has possessed since its earliest antecedents, now admirably brought up to date by this outstanding work.
Tracing teachers' experiences in the Third Reich and East Germany, Charles Lansing analyzes developments in education of crucial importance to both dictatorships. Lansing uses the town of Brandenburg an der Havel as a case study to examine ideological reeducation projects requiring the full mobilization of the schools and the active participation of a transformed teaching staff. Although lesson plans were easily changed, skilled teachers were neither quickly made nor easily substituted. The men and women charged in the postwar era with educating a new “antifascist” generation were, to a surprising degree, the same individuals who had worked to “Nazify” pupils in the Third Reich. But significant discontinuities existed as well, especially regarding the teachers' professional self-understanding and attitudes toward the state-sanctioned teachers' union. The mixture of continuities and discontinuities helped to stabilize the early GDR as it faced its first major crisis in the uprising of June 17, 1953.
This uniquely comparative work sheds new light on an essential story as it reconceptualizes the traditional periodization of postwar German and European history.
The antebellum South’s economic dependence on slavery engendered a rigid social order in which a small number of privileged white men dominated African Americans, poor whites, women, and many people with disabilities. From Pity to Pride examines the experiences of a group of wealthy young men raised in the old South who also would have ruled over this closely regimented world had they not been deaf. Instead, the promise of status was gone, replaced by pity, as described by one deaf scion, “I sometimes fancy some people to treat me as they would a child to whom they were kind.”
In this unique and fascinating history, Hannah Joyner depicts in striking detail the circumstances of these so-called victims of a terrible “misfortune.” Joyner makes clear that Deaf people in the North also endured prejudice. She also explains how the cultural rhetoric of paternalism and dependency in the South codified a stringent system of oppression and hierarchy that left little room for self-determination for Deaf southerners. From Pity to Pride reveals how some of these elite Deaf people rejected their family’s and society’s belief that being deaf was a permanent liability. Rather, they viewed themselves as competent and complete. As they came to adulthood, they joined together with other Deaf Americans, both southern and northern, to form communities of understanding, self-worth, and independence.
The contributors illuminate the breadth of developments that led to Brown, from the parallel struggles for social justice among African Americans in the South and Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans in the West during the late nineteenth century to the political and legal strategies implemented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) in the twentieth century. Describing the decision’s impact on local communities, essayists explore the conflict among African Americans over the implementation of Brown in Atlanta’s public schools as well as understandings of the ruling and its relevance among Puerto Rican migrants in New York City. Assessing the legacy of Brown today, contributors analyze its influence on contemporary law, African American thought, and educational opportunities for minority children.
Contributors
Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Davison M. Douglas
Raymond Gavins
Laurie B. Green
Christina Greene
Blair L. M. Kelley
Michael J. Klarman
Peter F. Lau
Madeleine E. Lopez
Waldo E. Martin Jr.
Vicki L. Ruiz
Christopher Schmidt
Larissa M. Smith
Patricia Sullivan
Kara Miles Turner
Mark V. Tushnet
An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s supplemental education industry.
Like many parents in the United States, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children’s academic performance, are turning to for-profit tutoring businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China’s supplemental education industry is now the world’s largest and most vibrant for-profit education market, and we can see its influence on the US higher education system: more than 70% of Chinese students studying in American universities have taken test preparation classes for overseas standardized tests. The Fruits of Opportunism offers a much-needed thorough investigation into this industry. This book examines how opportunistic organizations thrived in an ambiguous policy environment and how they catalyzed organizational and institutional changes in this industry.
A former insider in China’s Education Industry, sociologist Le Lin shows how and why this industry evolved to become a for-profit one dominated by private, formal, nationally operating, and globally financed corporations, despite restrictions the Chinese state placed on the industry. Looking closely at the opportunistic organizations that were founded by marginal entrepreneurs and quickly came to dominate the market, Lin finds that as their non-compliant practices spread across the industry, these opportunistic organizations pushed privatization and marketization from below. The case of China’s Education Industry laid out in The Fruits of Opportunism illustrates that while opportunism leaves destruction in its wake, it can also drive the formation and evolution of a market.
A fresh portrayal of one of the architects of the African American intellectual tradition, whose faith in the subversive power of education will inspire teachers and learners today.
“As departments…scramble to decolonize their curriculum, Givens illuminates a longstanding counter-canon in predominantly black schools and colleges.”
—Boston Review
“Informative and inspiring…An homage to the achievement of an often-forgotten racial pioneer.”
—Glenn C. Altschuler, Florida Courier
“A long-overdue labor of love and analysis…that would make Woodson, the ever-rigorous teacher, proud.”
—Randal Maurice Jelks, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Fascinating, and groundbreaking. Givens restores Carter G. Woodson, one of the most important educators and intellectuals of the twentieth century, to his rightful place alongside figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.”
—Imani Perry, author of May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem
Black education was subversive from its inception. African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of “fugitive pedagogy”—a theory and practice of Black education epitomized by Carter G. Woodson—groundbreaking historian, founder of Black History Month, and legendary educator under Jim Crow.
Givens shows that Woodson succeeded because of the world of Black teachers to which he belonged. Fugitive Pedagogy chronicles his ambitious efforts to fight what he called the “mis-education of the Negro” by helping teachers and students to see themselves and their mission as set apart from an anti-Black world. Teachers, students, families, and communities worked together, using Woodson’s materials and methods as they fought for power in schools. Forged in slavery and honed under Jim Crow, the vision of the Black experience Woodson articulated so passionately and effectively remains essential for teachers and students today.
Contributors. Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Günter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, José Estaban Muñoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos
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