A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY15 start with R start with R
Alon finds that affirmative action at elite institutions in both countries is a key vehicle of mobility for disenfranchised students, whether they are racial and ethnic minorities or socioeconomically disadvantaged. Affirmative action improves their academic success and graduation rates and leads to better labor market outcomes. The beneficiaries of affirmative action in both countries thrive at elite colleges and in selective fields of study. As Alon demonstrates, they would not be better off attending less selective colleges instead.
Alon finds that Israel’s class-based affirmative action programs have provided much-needed entry slots at the elite universities to students from the geographic periphery, from high-poverty high schools, and from poor families. However, this approach has not generated as much ethnic diversity as a race-based policy would. By contrast, affirmative action policies in the United States have fostered racial and ethnic diversity at a level that cannot be matched with class-based policies. Yet, class-based policies would do a better job at boosting the socioeconomic diversity at these bastions of privilege. The findings from both countries suggest that neither race-based nor class-based models by themselves can generate broad diversity. According to Alon, the best route for promoting both racial and socioeconomic diversity is to embed the consideration of race within class-based affirmative action. Such a hybrid model would maximize the mobility benefits for both socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority students.
Race, Class, and Affirmative Action moves past political talking points to offer an innovative, evidence-based perspective on the merits and feasibility of different designs of affirmative action.
Higher education has seen better days. Harsh budget cuts, the precarious nature of employment in college teaching, and political hostility to the entire enterprise of education have made for an increasingly fraught landscape. Radical Hope is an ambitious response to this state of affairs, at once political and practical—the work of an activist, teacher, and public intellectual grappling with some of the most pressing topics at the intersection of higher education and social justice.
Kevin Gannon asks that the contemporary university’s manifold problems be approached as opportunities for critical engagement, arguing that, when done effectively, teaching is by definition emancipatory and hopeful. Considering individual pedagogical practice, the students who are the primary audience and beneficiaries of teaching, and the institutions and systems within which teaching occurs, Radical Hope surveys the field, tackling everything from impostor syndrome to cell phones in class to allegations of a campus “free speech crisis.” Throughout, Gannon translates ideals into tangible strategies and practices (including key takeaways at the conclusion of each chapter), with the goal of reclaiming teachers’ essential role in the discourse of higher education.
Newman argues that an adequate K–12 education is the right of all citizens, as a matter of equality, and emphasizes that this right must be shielded from the sway of partisan and majoritarian policy making far more than it currently is. She then examines how educational rights are realized in our current democratic structure, offering two case studies of leading types of rights-based activism: school finance litigation on the state level and the mobilization of citizens through community-based organizations. Bringing these case studies together with rich philosophical analysis, Realizing Educational Rights advances understanding of the relationships among moral and legal rights, education reform, and democratic politics.
• Preserving the integrity of research and public respect for higher education
• Eliminating and managing individual and institutional financial conflicts of interest
• Maintaining unbiased hiring and recruitment policies
• Establishing grievance procedures and due process rights for faculty, graduate students, and academic professionals
• Mastering the complications of negotiations over patents and copyright
• Assuring the ethics of research involving human subjects.
In a time of dynamic change Recommended Principles to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships offers an indispensable and authoritative guide to sustaining integrity and tradition while achieving great things in twenty-first century academia.
In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction.
Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost.
Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.
School reform is almost always born out of big dreams and well-meaning desires to change the status quo. But between lofty reform legislation and the students whose education is at stake, there are numerous additional policies and policymakers who determine how reforms operate. Even in the best cases, school reform initiatives can perpetuate problems created by earlier reforms or existing injustices, all while introducing new complications. In Reforming the Reform, political scientist Susan L. Moffitt, education policy scholar Michaela Krug O’Neill, and the late policy and education scholar David K. Cohen take on a wide-ranging examination of the many intricacies of school reform.
With a particular focus on policymakers in the spaces between legislation and implementation, such as the countless school superintendents and district leaders tasked with developing new policies in the unique context of their district or schools, the authors identify common problems that arise when trying to operationalize ambitious reform ideas. Their research draws on more than 250 interviews with administrators in Tennessee and California (chosen as contrasts for their different political makeup and centralization of the education system) and is presented here alongside survey data from across the United States as well as archival data to demonstrate how public schools shoulder enormous responsibilities for the American social safety net. They provide a general explanation for problems facing social policy reforms in federalist systems (including healthcare) and offer pathways forward for education policy in particular.
In The Rhetoric of Remediation, Jane Stanley examines the statements and actions made regarding remediation at the University of California, Berkeley (Cal). Since its inception in 1868, university rhetoric has served to negotiate the tensions between an ethic of access and the assertion of elite status. Great care has been taken to promote the politics of public accessibility, yet in its competition for standing among other institutions, Cal has been publicly critical of the “underpreparedness” of many entrants. Early on, Cal developed programs to teach “Subject A” (Composition) to the vast number of students who lacked basic writing skills.
Stanley documents the evolution of the university's “rhetoric of remediation” at key moments in its history, such as: the early years of “open gate” admissions; the economic panic of the late 1800s and its effect on enrollment; Depression-era battles over funding and the creation of a rival system of regional state colleges; the GI Bill and ensuing post-WWII glut in enrollments; the “Red Scare” and its attacks on faculty, administrators, and students; the Civil Rights Movement and the resultant changes to campus politics; sexist admission policies and a de facto male-quota system; accusations of racism in the instruction of Asian Americans during the 1970s; the effects of an increasing number of students, beginning in the 1980s, for whom English was a second language; and the recent development of the College Writing Program which combined freshmen composition with Subject A instruction, in an effort to remove the concept of remediation altogether.
Setting her discussion within the framework of American higher education, Stanley finds that the rhetorical phenomenon of “embrace-and-disgrace” is not unique to Cal, and her study encourages compositionists to evaluate their own institutional practices and rhetoric of remediation for the benefit of both students and educators.
A leading expert shows how, by learning from refugee teachers and students, we can create for displaced children—and indeed all children—better schooling and brighter futures.
Half of the world’s 26 million refugees are children. Their formal education is disrupted, and their lives are too often dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about what the future holds. Even kids who have the opportunity to attend school face enormous challenges, as they struggle to integrate into unfamiliar societies and educational environments.
In Right Where We Belong, Sarah Dryden-Peterson discovers that, where governments and international agencies have been stymied, refugee teachers and students themselves are leading. From open-air classrooms in Uganda to the hallways of high schools in Maine, new visions for refugee education are emerging. Dryden-Peterson introduces us to people like Jacques—a teacher who created a school for his fellow Congolese refugees in defiance of local laws—and Hassan, a Somali refugee navigating the social world of the American teenager. Drawing on more than 600 interviews in twenty-three countries, Dryden-Peterson shows how teachers and students are experimenting with flexible forms of learning. Rather than adopt the unrealistic notion that all will soon return to “normal,” these schools embrace unfamiliarity, develop students’ adaptiveness, and demonstrate how children, teachers, and community members can build supportive relationships across lines of difference.
It turns out that policymakers, activists, and educators have a lot to learn from displaced children and teachers. Their stories point the way to better futures for refugee students and inspire us to reimagine education broadly, so that children everywhere are better prepared to thrive in a diverse and unpredictable world.
In developed nations around the world, residential schools for deaf students are giving way to the trend of inclusion in regular classrooms. Nonetheless, deaf education continues to lag as the students struggle to communicate. In the Bua School in Thailand, however, 400 residential deaf students ranging in age from 6 to 19 have met with great success in teaching each other Thai Sign Language (TSL) and a world of knowledge once thought to be lost to them. The Rising of Lotus Flowers: Self-Education by Deaf Children in Thai Boarding Schools reveals how their institutionalization allowed them to foster a unique incubator of communication and education.
Charles B. Reilly, a teacher and community organizer in Thailand for eight years, and Nipapon Reilly, a Deaf Thai citizen, studied the students in the Bua School for 14 years, with periodic follow-ups thereafter. They found that the students learned little from their formal instructors, but that they were able to educate each other in time spent away from the classroom. Older students who had learned TSL in the dorms and on the playground successfully passed it on to six-year-olds who had virtually no language at all. The Reillys’ study uncovers an elaborate hierarchy of education among these students, with each group using games and other activities to teach and bring other classmates up to their level. Named for the much admired aquatic plant that blooms in Thailand’s bogs, the Bua School epitomizes the ideal of The Rising of Lotus Flowers, which also offers analytical evidence of the continuing value of residential schools in deaf education.
The issue begins with a reassessment of the EEO’s major findings. Karl Alexander analyzes the report’s conclusion that families exert greater influence on children’s school performance than the schools themselves. He finds that family, school, and neighborhood all interact to shape children’s academic development in ways that are not always separable. Other contributors investigate how racial achievement gaps have changed since the report’s release. Sean Reardon finds that disparities in average school poverty rates between white and black students’ schools are the most powerful correlate of achievement gaps. Barbara Schneider and Guan Saw show that while blacks aspire to attend college at greater rates than whites, fewer blacks than whites now attend four-year colleges in part due to lesser access to college preparation activities, such as advanced-level academic courses.
Contributors also evaluate and update the EEO’s proposals to reduce longstanding socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps. Prudence L. Carter argues that effective policies for ending racial disparities must account for inequalities within schools as well as between them. Brian Jacob and coauthors explore whether technological advances since the EEO, including online courses, have the potential to reduce some of the educational inequalities associated with residential segregation. Ruth Turley shows how renewed partnerships between education researchers and policymakers at the local, regional, and national levels can improve disadvantaged students’ educational outcomes and increase racial and economic integration. By looking forward as well as back, this issue of RSF documents what educators and scholars have learned from fifty years of social science research on educational opportunity.
The ESEA has historically enabled the federal government to address educational inequality at the local level. Among the nine articles in the issue, Erica Frankenberg and Kendra Taylor discuss how the ESEA, in conjunction with the Civil Rights Act, accelerated desegregation in the South in the 1960s by withholding federal funding from school districts that failed to integrate. Rucker C. Johnson shows that higher ESEA spending in school districts between 1965 and 1980 led to increased likelihood of high school graduation for students, and low-income students in particular. Students in districts with higher spending were also less likely to repeat grades or to be suspended from school. Yet, as Patrick McGuinn shows, the institutional and administrative capacity of the U.S. Department of Education has never been sufficient to force instructional changes at the school level. This was particularly true with the 2001 renewal of the ESEA, the No Child Left Behind Act, which linked federal funding to schools’ test-score outcomes rather than to programs designed to combat social inequalities.
The issue also investigates the unintended consequences of the ESEA and offers solutions to offset them. As Patricia Gándara and Gloria Ladson-Billings demonstrate, ESEA reforms have, in some circumstances, led to the neglect of the needs of minority students and second-language learners. Gándara shows that No Child Left Behind requires “bilingual” education programs to focus on rapid acquisition of English, often to the detriment of those learning English as a second language. Ladson-Billings shows that the ESEA’s standardized testing mandates may suppress innovative teaching methods, and argues for reforms that use multidisciplinary approaches to craft new curricula. Bringing together research on the successes and shortcomings of the ESEA, this issue of RSF offers new insights into federal education policy and demonstrates that this landmark legislation remains a powerful force in the lives of educators and students fifty years after its initial implementation.
Articles in the issue examine the extent to which the recommendations in the Kerner Report contributed to policy changes and improvements in the social and economic well-being of urban residents . In their introduction, Gooden and Myers analyze changes in socioeconomic inequality between whites and blacks over the last five decades. They find that while the black poverty rate has declined and black educational attainment has increased, disparities still remain. Additionally, the income gap and disparities in unemployment between blacks and whites remain virtually unchanged. Rick Loessberg and John Koskinen similarly note the persistence of these disparities, but also show that some of the Kerner Report’s recommendations were adopted at local levels and have provided the foundation for increased racial diversity in media, law enforcement reforms, and public housing desegregation.
Other contributors study the urban areas that were sites of the riots. Reynolds Farley shows that in Detroit, residential segregation has declined and interracial marriage has increased over the last fifty years. However, on key economic measures such as income and wealth, African Americans have fallen even further behind whites than they were in 1967 due to dramatic changes in Detroit’s labor market. In their study of wealth inequality in Los Angeles, Melany De La Cruz-Viesca and coauthors show that much of the wealth gap between blacks and whites is due to disparities in home ownership, a subject neglected in the Kerner Report. Marcus Casey and Bradley Hardy study the evolution of African American neighborhoods since the Kerner Report and find that neighborhoods directly affected by riots in the 1960s still remain among the most economically disadvantaged today.
The Kerner Report endures as a classic touchstone in the nation’s search for a path toward equality. Together, the articles in this special issue demonstrate the long-term influence of the report and show where further progress is needed to close the racial divide.
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