2728 books match the query 'Education' and 151 start with r

cover of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Higher Education Effectiveness

RSF

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Higher Education Effectiveness

Steven G. Brint

Russell Sage Foundation, 2016

The American system of higher education includes over 5,000 degree granting institutions, ranging from small for-profit technical training schools up to the nation’s elite liberal arts colleges and research universities. Over 20 million students are enrolled, with federal, state, and local governments spending almost 3 percent of GDP on higher education. Yet how can we evaluate the effectiveness of such a large, fragmented system?  Are students being adequately prepared for today’s labor market? Is the system accessible to all? Are new business methods contributing to greater efficiency and better student outcomes?  In Higher Education Effectiveness, editors Steven Brint and Charles Clotfelter and a group of higher education experts address these questions with new evidence and insights regarding the effectiveness of U.S. higher education. 

Beginning with the editors’ authoritative introduction, the contributors assess the effectiveness of U.S. higher education at the national, state, campus, and classroom levels. Several focus on the effects of the steep decline in state funding in recent years, which has contributed to rising tuition at most state universities.  Steven Hemelt and David Marcotte find that the financial burdens of attendance, even at public institutions, is a significant and growing impediment for students from low-income families. John Witte, Barbara Wolfe, and Sara Dahill-Brown analyze 36 years of enrollment trends at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and find increased enrollment of upper-income students, suggesting widening inequality of access.
James Rosenbaum and his coauthors examine the effectiveness of “college for all” policies and find that on a wide range of economic and job satisfaction measures, holders of sub-baccalaureate credentials outperform those who start but do not complete four-year colleges.  Two papers – by Kevin Dougherty and coauthors and Michael Kurlaender and coauthors – find that the use of new regulatory mechanisms such as performance funding and rating systems are plagued by unintended consequences that can provide misleading measures of institutional effectiveness.  Lynn Reimer and co-authors examine the effectiveness of the “promising practices” in STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) promoted by the National Academy of Sciences, and find that they can increase completion rates among low-income, first-generation, and under-represented students.

Expanding college access and effectiveness is a key way to promote economic mobility. The important findings in this issue illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. system of higher education and suggest new avenues for improving student outcomes.
 
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cover of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Spatial Foundations of Inequality

RSF

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Spatial Foundations of Inequality

George Galster

Russell Sage Foundation, 2017

From school and residential segregation to increased pollution and aggressive policing in low-income neighborhoods, socioeconomic inequality is organized and reinforced through space and place. In this issue of RSF, editors George Galster and Patrick Sharkey and contributors present a new conceptual model for understanding space as one of the  foundations of inequality. They bring together empirical research on neighborhoods, schools, and communities to demonstrate the extent to which people’s environments influence their life chances.
 
Articles in this issue explore the scale and dimensions of spatial inequality. Sean Reardon and coauthors develop a novel method of describing the joint distribution of race and income among neighborhoods. They demonstrate how blacks and Hispanics at all income levels typically live in substantially poorer neighborhoods than whites and Asians of the same income. Ann Owens investigates the relationship between residential segregation and school boundaries and finds that because parents often decide where to live based on school districts, school-age children live in more segregated neighborhoods than adults on the whole. John Hipp and Charis Kubrin examine how changes in the racial, ethnic, and economic composition of the areas that surround a given neighborhood affect it, and find that when inequality rises in a neighborhood’s surrounding areas, crime tends to increase in that neighborhood.
 
Other contributors study how space serves to maintain or reproduce inequalities. Anna Maria Santiago and coauthors find that neighborhood conditions—including racial and socioeconomic makeup and levels of violent crime—affect the chances that black and Latino youths will engage in risky behaviors, such as running away and using marijuana. For instance, low-income African American youths who live in neighborhoods inhabited by higher status residents are less likely to run away from home. Christopher Browning and coauthors examine the extent to which people of different socioeconomic status share space in their day-to-day lives, including working, shopping, and spending leisure time. They find that families of higher socioeconomic status are less likely to share common spaces with neighbors of any class, in part because they have more choice and control over where they go.
 
As the articles in this issue show, space is a core dimension of social stratification and is fundamental to understanding social and economic inequality.
 
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cover of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Coleman Report and Educational Inequality Fifty Years Later

RSF

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Coleman Report and Educational Inequality Fifty Years Later

Karl Alexander

Russell Sage Foundation, 2016

The 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity Report (EEO)—also known as the Coleman Report—is one of the most important education studies of the twentieth century. Commissioned by Congress as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the report revealed pervasive school segregation by race, among other inequalities, and began a national dialogue on educational opportunity for minority children. On the fiftieth anniversary of the EEO report, leading scholars revisit its legacy in this special issue of RSF, edited by Karl Alexander and Stephen Morgan. The contributors examine the report’s methods and conclusions through the lens of social science advances over the past half century, and analyze issues such as school reform, persistent racial segregation, and changing educational standards to provide a thoughtful analysis of barriers to educational opportunity today.
 
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.
 
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cover of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act at Fifty and Beyond

RSF

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act at Fifty and Beyond

David A. Gamson

Russell Sage Foundation, 2015

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, a key component of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, was designed to aid low-income students and to combat racial segregation in schools. Over the last several decades, the ESEA has become the federal government’s main source of leverage on states and school districts to enact its preferred reforms, including controversial measures such as standardized testing. In this issue of RSF, an esteemed group of education scholars examine the historical evolution of the ESEA, its successes and pitfalls, and what they portend for the future of education policies.
 
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.
 
 
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cover of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report

RSF

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report

Susan T. Gooden

Russell Sage Foundation, 2018

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of the more than 150 urban riots sweeping cities throughout the nation. In 1968, the commission released its findings, widely known as the Kerner Report, and warned that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” This special issue of RSF, edited by political scientist Susan Gooden and economist Samuel Myers, revisits the Kerner Report’s conclusions and recommendations on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. How far have we come? What worked and what didn’t? How does the Kerner Report help us understand racial disparities in the twenty-first century?
 
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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cover of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Using Administrative Data for Science and Policy

RSF

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Using Administrative Data for Science and Policy

Andrew M. Penner

Russell Sage Foundation, 2019

Note: The catalog copy refers to both issues 2 and 3.

In the twenty-first century, administrative data collected by the government, schools, hospitals, and other institutions are essential for effectively managing and evaluating public programs. Yet the U. S. lags behind many other countries when it comes to organizing these data and making linkages across different domains, such as education, health, and the labor market. This double issue of RSF, edited by sociologist Andrew Penner and developmental psychologist Kenneth Dodge, illustrates the tremendous potential of administrative data and provides guidance for the researchers and policymakers. Contributors across multiple disciplines demonstrate how linking disparate sources of administrative data can help us better understand the challenges faced by people in need, thereby improving the reach and efficiency of policy solutions.
 
Several contributors show how databases tracking educational attainment yield new insights into the role of schools in either ameliorating or perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities. Sean Reardon analyzes standardized test scores of roughly 45 million K-12 students nationwide to explore how educational opportunity varies by school districts over time. He finds that while affluent districts typically provide high levels of early childhood learning opportunities, there are some schools in high-poverty districts that do have increased average test scores between third and eighth grade. However, this growth still does not close the large achievement gap between low-and high-socioeconomic-status students. Megan Austin and coauthors, using student-level longitudinal data from Indiana, analyze the effects of school voucher programs on academic achievement and find that students who switch from a public to a private school with a voucher experience significant declines in achievement, particularly in math.
 
Other articles demonstrate how the analysis of administrative data can further our understanding of racial and gender inequality. Janelle Downing and Tim Bruckner link housing foreclosure records and birth records to show that foreclosures and related stresses during the Great Recession contributed to premature births and lower birth weights, particularly for Hispanic mothers and their children. Roberto Fernandez and Brian Rubineau investigate hiring data to explore how network recruitment, or recruitment through employer referrals, affects the “glass ceiling” in the workplace. They show that network recruitment increases women’s representation strongly at lower job levels, and to a lesser extent at higher levels.
 
Researchers now have unprecedented access to administrative data. As this issue shows, finding innovative ways to combine multiple data sets can facilitate partnerships between social scientists, administrators, and policymakers and extend our understanding of pressing social issues.
[more]
cover of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Using Administrative Data for Science and Policy

RSF

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Using Administrative Data for Science and Policy

Andrew M. Penner

Russell Sage Foundation, 2019

Note: The catalog copy refers to both issues 2 and 3.

In the twenty-first century, administrative data collected by the government, schools, hospitals, and other institutions are essential for effectively managing and evaluating public programs. Yet the U. S. lags behind many other countries when it comes to organizing these data and making linkages across different domains, such as education, health, and the labor market. This double issue of RSF, edited by sociologist Andrew Penner and developmental psychologist Kenneth Dodge, illustrates the tremendous potential of administrative data and provides guidance for the researchers and policymakers. Contributors across multiple disciplines demonstrate how linking disparate sources of administrative data can help us better understand the challenges faced by people in need, thereby improving the reach and efficiency of policy solutions.
 
Several contributors show how databases tracking educational attainment yield new insights into the role of schools in either ameliorating or perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities. Sean Reardon analyzes standardized test scores of roughly 45 million K-12 students nationwide to explore how educational opportunity varies by school districts over time. He finds that while affluent districts typically provide high levels of early childhood learning opportunities, there are some schools in high-poverty districts that do have increased average test scores between third and eighth grade. However, this growth still does not close the large achievement gap between low-and high-socioeconomic-status students. Megan Austin and coauthors, using student-level longitudinal data from Indiana, analyze the effects of school voucher programs on academic achievement and find that students who switch from a public to a private school with a voucher experience significant declines in achievement, particularly in math.
 
Other articles demonstrate how the analysis of administrative data can further our understanding of racial and gender inequality. Janelle Downing and Tim Bruckner link housing foreclosure records and birth records to show that foreclosures and related stresses during the Great Recession contributed to premature births and lower birth weights, particularly for Hispanic mothers and their children. Roberto Fernandez and Brian Rubineau investigate hiring data to explore how network recruitment, or recruitment through employer referrals, affects the “glass ceiling” in the workplace. They show that network recruitment increases women’s representation strongly at lower job levels, and to a lesser extent at higher levels.
 
Researchers now have unprecedented access to administrative data. As this issue shows, finding innovative ways to combine multiple data sets can facilitate partnerships between social scientists, administrators, and policymakers and extend our understanding of pressing social issues.
[more]
cover of Race among Friends: Exploring Race at a Suburban School

Race among Friends

Exploring Race at a Suburban School

Modica, Marianne

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Many saw the 2008 election of Barack Obama as a sign that America had moved past the issue of race, that a colorblind society was finally within reach. But as Marianne Modica reveals in Race Among Friends, attempts to be colorblind do not end racism—in fact, ignoring race increases the likelihood that racism will occur in our schools and in society.
 
This intriguing volume focuses on a “racially friendly” suburban charter school called Excellence Academy, highlighting the ways that students and teachers think about race and act out racial identity. Modica finds that even in an environment where students of all racial backgrounds work and play together harmoniously, race affects the daily experiences of students and teachers in profound but unexamined ways. Some teachers, she notes, feared that talking about race in the classroom would open them to charges of racism, so they avoided the topic. And rather than generate honest and constructive conversations about race, student friendships opened the door for insensitive racial comments by whites, resentment and silence by blacks, and racially biased administrative practices. In the end, the school’s friendly environment did not promote—and may have hindered—serious discussion of race and racial inequity.
 
The desire to ignore race in favor of a “colorblind society,” Modica writes, has become an entrenched part of American culture. But as Race Among Friends shows, when race becomes a taboo subject, it has serious ramifications for students and teachers of all ethnic origins.
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cover of Race and Biblical Studies: Antiracism Pedagogy for the Classroom

Race and Biblical Studies

Antiracism Pedagogy for the Classroom

Tat-siong Benny Liew

SBL Press, 2022

Classrooms as communities are temporary, but the racial effects can be long term.

The biblical studies classroom can be a site of personal and social transformation. To make it a space for positive change, the contributors to this volume question and reevaluate traditional teaching practices and assessment tools that foreground white, Western scholarship in order to offer practical guidance for an antiracist pedagogy. The introduction and fifteen essays provide tools for engaging issues of social context and scriptural authority, nationalism and religious identities, critical race theory, and how race, gender, and class can be addressed empathetically. Contributors Sonja Anderson, Randall C. Bailey, Eric D. Barreto, Denise Kimber Buell, Greg Carey, Haley Gabrielle, Wilda C. Gafney, Julián Andrés González Holguín, Sharon Jacob, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Francisco Lozada Jr., Shelly Matthews, Roger S. Nam, Wongi Park, Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Abraham Smith, and Kay Higuera Smith share their experience creating classrooms that are spaces that enable the production of new knowledge without reproducing a white subject of the geopolitical West.

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cover of Race and Class Matters at an Elite College

Race and Class Matters at an Elite College

Elizabeth Aries

Temple University Press, 2008

In Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, Elizabeth Aries provides a rare glimpse into the challenges faced by black and white college students from widely different class backgrounds as they come to live together as freshmen. Based on an intensive study Aries conducted with 58 students at Amherst College during the 2005-2006 academic year, this book offers a uniquely personal look at the day-to-day thoughts and feelings of students as they experience racial and economic diversity firsthand, some for the first time.

Through online questionnaires and face-to-face interviews, Aries followed four groups of students throughout their first year of college: affluent whites, affluent blacks, less financially advantaged whites from families with more limited education, and less financially advantaged blacks from the same background. Drawing heavily on the voices of these freshmen, Aries chronicles what they learned from racial and class diversity—and what colleges might do to help their students learn more.

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cover of Race and Education, 1954-2007

Race and Education, 1954-2007

Raymond Wolters

University of Missouri Press, 2008

With the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown decisions of 1954 and 1955, American education changed forever. But Brown was just the beginning, and Raymond Wolters contends that its best intentions have been taken to unnecessary extremes.

In this compelling study, a scholar who has long observed the traumas of school desegregation uncovers the changes and difficulties with which public education has dealt over the last fifty years—and argues that some judicial decisions were ill-advised. Dealing candidly with matters usually considered taboo in academic discourse, Wolters argues that the Supreme Court acted correctly and in accordance with public sentiment in Brown but that it later took a wrong turn by equating desegregation with integration.

Retracing the history of desegregation and integration in America’s schools, Wolters distinguishes between several Court decisions, explaining that while Brown called for desegregation by requiring that schools deal with students on a racially nondiscriminatory basis, subsequent decisions—Green, Swann, Keyes—required actual integration through racial balancing. He places these decisions in the context of educational reform in the 1950s that sought to encourage bright students through advanced placement and honors courses—courses in which African American and Hispanic students were less likely to be enrolled. Then with the racial unrest of the 1960s, the pursuit of academic excellence yielded to concerns for uplifting disadvantaged youths and ensuring the predominance of middle-class peer groups in schools.

Wolters draws on rich historical records to document the devastating consequences of requiring racial balance and sheds new light on America’s legal, social, and cultural landscapes. He reexamines the educational theories of Kenneth Clark and James Coleman, and he challenges statistics that support the results of racial balancing by describing how school desegregation and integration actually proceeded in several towns, cities, and counties.

Race and Education is a bold challenge to political correctness in education and a corrective to the now widely accepted notion that desegregation and racially balanced integration are one and the same. It is essential reading for scholars of law and education and a wake-up call for citizens concerned about the future of America’s schools.
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cover of Race and Place: School Desegregation in Prince George's County, Maryland

Race and Place

School Desegregation in Prince George's County, Maryland

Deirdre Mayer Dougherty

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Race and Place considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George’s County, Maryland, from 1945 through 1973. The book is organized around several successive policies that emerged in this time: school equalization, school choice, neighborhood schools, school construction, school closure, busing for racial integration, and school discipline. Dougherty shows how these policies contained and reinforced assumptions about place and created new racial truths about people and schooling.
 
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cover of Race and Schooling in the South, 1880-1950: An Economic History

Race and Schooling in the South, 1880-1950

An Economic History

Robert A. Margo

University of Chicago Press, 1990

The interrelation among race, schooling, and labor market opportunities of American blacks can help us make sense of the relatively poor economic status of blacks in contemporary society. The role of these factors in slavery and the economic consequences for blacks has received much attention, but the post-slave experience of blacks in the American economy has been less studied. To deepen our understanding of that experience, Robert A. Margo mines a wealth of newly available census data and school district records. By analyzing evidence concerning occupational discrimination, educational expenditures, taxation, and teachers' salaries, he clarifies the costs for blacks of post-slave segregation.

"A concise, lucid account of the bases of racial inequality in the South between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era. . . . Deserves the careful attention of anyone concerned with historical and contemporary race stratification."—Kathryn M. Neckerman, Contemporary Sociology

"Margo has produced an excellent study, which can serve as a model for aspiring cliometricians. To describe it as 'required reading' would fail to indicate just how important, indeed indispensable, the book will be to scholars interested in racial economic differences, past or present."—Robert Higgs, Journal of Economic Literature

"Margo shows that history is important in understanding present domestic problems; his study has significant implications for understanding post-1950s black economic development."—Joe M. Richardson, Journal of American History

[more]
cover of Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things

Race and the Education of Desire

Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things

Ann Laura Stoler

Duke University Press, 1995

Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of History of Sexuality in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault’s history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler challenges Foucault’s tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of History of Sexuality contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race.
Drawing on Foucault’s little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as “racisms of the state.” In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault’s insights have in the past constrained—and in the future may help shape—the ways we trace the genealogies of race.
Race and the Education of Desire will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault.
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cover of Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools

Race at the Top

Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools

Natasha Warikoo

University of Chicago Press, 2022

An illuminating, in-depth look at competition in suburban high schools with growing numbers of Asian Americans, where white parents are determined to ensure that their children remain at the head of the class.
 
The American suburb conjures an image of picturesque privilege: manicured lawns, quiet streets, and—most important to parents—high-quality schools. These elite enclaves are also historically white, allowing many white Americans to safeguard their privileges by using public schools to help their children enter top colleges. That’s changing, however, as Asian American professionals increasingly move into wealthy suburban areas to give their kids that same leg up for their college applications and future careers.
 
As Natasha Warikoo shows in Race at the Top, white and Asian parents alike will do anything to help their children get to the top of the achievement pile. She takes us into the affluent suburban East Coast school she calls “Woodcrest High,” with a student body about one-half white and one-third Asian American. As increasing numbers of Woodcrest’s Asian American students earn star-pupil status, many whites feel displaced from the top of the academic hierarchy, and their frustrations grow. To maintain their children’s edge, some white parents complain to the school that schoolwork has become too rigorous. They also emphasize excellence in extracurriculars like sports and theater, which maintains their children’s advantage.

Warikoo reveals how, even when they are bested, white families in Woodcrest work to change the rules in their favor so they can remain the winners of the meritocracy game. Along the way, Warikoo explores urgent issues of racial and economic inequality that play out in affluent suburban American high schools. Caught in a race for power and privilege at the very top of society, what families in towns like Woodcrest fail to see is that everyone in their race is getting a medal—the children who actually lose are those living beyond their town’s boundaries.
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cover of Race in the College Classroom

Race in the College Classroom

TuSmith, Bonnie

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Winner of the 2003 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Awards
Winner of the 2003 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award


Did affirmative action programs solve the problem of race on American college campuses, as several recent books would have us believe? If so, why does talking about race in anything more than a superficial way make so many students uncomfortable? Written by college instructors from many disciplines, this volume of essays takes a bold first step toward a nationwide conversation. Each of the twenty-nine contributors addresses one central question: what are the challenges facing a college professor who believes that teaching responsibly requires an honest and searching examination of race?

Professors from the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and education consider topics such as how the classroom environment is structured by race; the temptation to retreat from challenging students when faced with possible reprisals in the form of complaints or negative evaluations; the implications of using standardized evaluations in faculty tenure and promotion when the course subject is intimately connected with race; and the varying ways in which white faculty and faculty of color are impacted by teaching about race.     

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cover of Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom

Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom

Edited by Cristina Stanciu and Gary Totten

University of Illinois Press, 2024

The contemporary rethinking and relearning of history and racism has sparked creative approaches for teaching the histories and representations of marginalized communities. Cristina Stanciu and Gary Totten edit a collection that illuminates these ideas for a variety of fields, areas of education, and institutional contexts.

The authors draw on their own racial and ethnic backgrounds to examine race and racism in the context of addressing necessary and often difficult classroom conversations about race, histories of exclusion, and racism. Case studies, reflections, and personal experiences provide guidance for addressing race and racism in the classroom. In-depth analysis looks at attacks on teaching Critical Race Theory and other practices for studying marginalized histories and voices. Throughout, the contributors shine a light on how a critical framework focused on race advances an understanding of contemporary and historical US multiethnic literatures for students around the world and in all fields of study.

Contributors: Kristen Brown, Nancy Carranza, Luis Cortes, Marilyn Edelstein, Naomi Edwards, Joanne Lipson Freed, Yadira Gamez, Lauren J. Gantz, Jennifer Ho, Shermaine M. Jones, Norell Martinez, Sarah Minslow, Crystal R. Pérez, Kevin Pyon, Emily Ruth Rutter, Ariel Santos, and C. Anneke Snyder

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cover of Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities

Race in the Schoolyard

Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities

Lewis, Amanda E

Rutgers University Press, 2003

"Race in the Schoolyard is a wonderful book for social scientists studying race, education, and childhood studies. The book showcases the talents of a gifted fieldworker whose theoretically rich work sits on the cutting edge of a growing body of scholarship examining the social worlds of children. School officials, parents, and, most especially, a new generation of teachers will benefit from these lessons on race."-American Journal of Sociology

"Instructors may recommend this book to students to whom the topic is surely vital and engrossing and for whom the text will be lively and engaging."-Contemporary Sociology

"Lewis moves beyond traditional research methods used to examine achievement gaps and differences in test scores to look closely at the realities of schooling. I highly recommend this work for every person involved in teaching and learning."-Multicultural Review

"Through eloquent case studies of three California elementary schools-a white-majority 'good' school, a mostly minority 'tough' school, and an integrated 'alternative' school-[Lewis] demonstrates that schools promote racial inequalities through their daily rituals and practices. Even the notion of a "color-blind" America-an especially popular ideal in the white school-perpetuates racism, Lewis argues, because it denies or dismisses the very real constraints that schools place on minorities. Lewis is nevertheless an optimist, insisting that schools can change ideas of race. . . . Highly recommended. Undergraduate collections and above."-Choice

"In this pioneering ethnography in elementary schools, Lewis shows brilliantly how racism is taught and learned in the small places of everyday life."-Joe Feagin, University of Florida and author of Racist America

"A wonderful and timely book. Ethnographically rich, theoretically sophisticated, and clearly written, this book addresses the ubiquitous issue of race in all its complexity."-Michèle Foster, author of Black Teachers on Teaching

"A compelling ethnography of the racial landscape of contemporary schools."-Barrie Thorne, author of Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School

Could your kids be learning a fourth R at school: reading, writing, 'rithmatic, and race?

Race in the Schoolyard takes us to a place most of us seldom get to see in action¾ our children's classrooms¾ and reveals the lessons about race that are communicated there. Amanda E. Lewis spent a year observing classes at three elementary schools, two multiracial urban and one white suburban. While race of course is not officially taught like multiplication and punctuation, she finds that it nonetheless insinuates itself into everyday life in schools.

Lewis explains how the curriculum, both expressed and hidden, conveys many racial lessons. While teachers and other school community members verbally deny the salience of race, she illustrates how it does influence the way they understand the world, interact with each other, and teach children. This eye-opening text is important reading for educators, parents, and scholars alike.

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cover of Race, Class, and Affirmative Action

Race, Class, and Affirmative Action

Sigal Alon is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University.

Russell Sage Foundation, 2015

No issue in American higher education is more contentious than that of race-based affirmative action. In light of the ongoing debate around the topic and recent Supreme Court rulings, affirmative action policy may be facing further changes. As an alternative to race-based affirmative action, some analysts suggest affirmative action policies based on class. In Race, Class, and Affirmative Action, sociologist Sigal Alon studies the race-based affirmative action policies in the United States. and the class-based affirmative action policies in Israel. Alon evaluates how these different policies foster campus diversity and socioeconomic mobility by comparing the Israeli policy with a simulated model of race-based affirmative action and the U.S. policy with a simulated model of class-based affirmative action.

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.
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cover of Race, Real Estate and Education: Inventing Gentrification in Philadelphia, 1960-2020

Race, Real Estate and Education

Inventing Gentrification in Philadelphia, 1960-2020

Edward M. Epstein

Temple University Press, 2025

Philadelphia’s urban renewal efforts in the 1950s, which re-envisioned the city as a residential enclave, were an early example of gentrification. In West Philadelphia in the 1960s, a coalition of universities and hospitals went further, initiating K-12 public school improvements meant to attract an affluent and whiter population. As Edward Epstein details in Race, Real Estate, and Education, these interventions discounted the negative impact they could have on neighborhood residents.

Epstein outlines the citywide context for the plan to create “University City” in West Philadelphia. He recounts the attempts to correct the segregation, overcrowding, and authoritarian management that plagued Philadelphia’s public schools. As the West Philadelphia Corporation, the proxy for the universities and hospitals, initiated gentrification efforts, the local community resisted and protested, causing the project to fail. The effort was revived with spectacular success, however, with the launch of the well-funded Penn Alexander School in 2001.

Race, Real Estate, and Education shows how the pursuit of urbanist ideals sometimes deepens neighborhood injustice. Epstein’s exploration of whether Philadelphia’s overall approach was beneficial or misguided presents a cautionary tale.

In the series Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy
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cover of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation

On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

David L. Eng and Shinhee Han

Duke University Press, 2018

In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. Throughout, Eng and Han link psychoanalysis to larger structural and historical phenomena, illuminating how the study of psychic processes of individuals can inform investigations of race, sexuality, and immigration while creating a more sustained conversation about the social lives of Asian Americans and Asians in the diaspora.
[more]
cover of Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference

Racism and Cultural Studies

Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference

E. San Juan Jr.

Duke University Press, 2002

In Racism and Cultural Studies E. San Juan Jr. offers a historical-materialist critique of practices in multiculturalism and cultural studies. Rejecting contemporary theories of inclusion as affirmations of the capitalist status quo, San Juan envisions a future of politically equal and economically empowered citizens through the democratization of power and the socialization of property. Calling U.S. nationalism the new “opium of the masses,” he argues that U.S. nationalism is where racist ideas and practices are formed, refined, and reproduced as common sense and consensus.

Individual chapters engage the themes of ethnicity versus racism, gender inequality, sexuality, and the politics of identity configured with the discourse of postcoloniality and postmodernism. Questions of institutional racism, social justice, democratization, and international power relations between the center and the periphery are explored and analyzed. San Juan fashions a critique of dominant disciplinary approaches in the humanities and social sciences and contends that “the racism question” functions as a catalyst and point of departure for cultural critiques based on a radical democratic vision. He also asks urgent questions regarding globalization and the future of socialist transformation of “third world” peoples and others who face oppression.

As one of the most notable cultural theorists in the United States today, San Juan presents a provocative challenge to the academy and other disciplinary institutions. His intervention will surely compel the attention of all engaged in intellectual exchanges where race/ethnicity serves as an urgent focus of concern.
[more]
cover of Radical Collections: Re-examining the roots of collections, practices and information professions

Radical Collections

Re-examining the roots of collections, practices and information professions

Edited by Jordan Landes

University of London Press, 2018

Available as free PDF download at http://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/radical_collections Do archivists ‘curate’ history? And to what extent are our librarians the gatekeepers of knowledge? Libraries and archives have a long and rich history of compiling ‘radical collections’- from Klanwatch Project in the States to the R. D. Laing Archive in Glasgow- but a re-examination of the information professions and all aspects of managing those collections is long overdue. This book is the result of a critical conference held at Senate House Library in 2017. The conference provided a space to debate the issues and ethics of collection development, management and promotion. This book brings together some key papers from those proceedings. It shines a light on pressing topical issues within library and information services (LIS)- to encompass selection, appraisal and accession, through to organisation and classification, and including promotion and use. Will libraries survive as victims of neoliberal marketization? Do we have a responsibility to collect and document ‘white hate’ in the era of Trump? And how can a predominantly white (96.7%) LIS workforce effectively collect and tell POC histories?
[more]
cover of Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

Radical Hope

A Teaching Manifesto

Kevin M. Gannon

West Virginia University Press, 2020

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.

[more]
cover of Radical Transparency: Perspectives on Graduate Education in Writing Studies

Radical Transparency

Perspectives on Graduate Education in Writing Studies

Justin H. Cook

Utah State University Press, 2027

Radical Transparency brings together candid, powerful accounts of what it means to live, work, and labor as a graduate student in writing studies in today’s academy. At a moment when higher education is defined by precarity, burnout, widening inequities, and political uncertainty, this collection names, without sanitizing, the emotional, embodied, and institutional realities that shape graduate education.

Blending scholarly analysis with personal narrative, the chapters document graduate student experiences across writing studies, rhetoric and composition, and related fields. Contributors take up issues often rendered invisible in official program materials and institutional discourse, including disability and access, queer and crip temporalities, financial and labor precarity, mentoring breakdowns, emotional labor, care work, grief, and the hidden curricula that govern graduate life. Together, these chapters reveal how graduate students navigate systems that demand resilience while frequently withholding transparency, support, and care. Organized around three intersecting threads—navigating precarity, building networks of care, and reimagining academic work—Radical Transparency also introduces an emotional-labor tagging system that allows readers to trace recurring forms of labor and affective demand as they surface in different institutional contexts.

Whether read cover to cover or approached nonlinearly, the text invites readers to see connections accumulate—and patterns emerge. Radical Transparency is for graduate students who suspect they’re not broken. It is for faculty and administrators willing to sit with discomfort, accountability, and complicity. And it is for anyone who believes that transparency without action is insufficient and that telling the truth, collectively and aloud, is a form of resistance.

[more]
cover of Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement

Radical Writing Center Praxis

A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement

Laura Greenfield

Utah State University Press, 2019

In Radical Writing Center Praxis Laura Greenfield calls for a paradigm change in writing centers, imagining a field whose very reason for being is to facilitate justice and peace. The book calls on readers to more critically examine power and agency in writing centers and to imagine new possibilities for the field’s theories and practices.
 
Large, intersecting systems of oppression manifest in the everyday practices of institutions, classrooms, and writing centers. Local practices in turn influence the surrounding world. Radical Writing Center Praxis therefore challenges the writing center field to resist assumptions of political neutrality and instead to redefine itself in terms of more explicit ethical commitments. In this paradigm it is clear that to engage in anti-oppression work is not merely a special interest but rather a vital interest to all.
 
Introducing the concepts and vocabulary of radical politics, Radical Writing Center Praxis examines the tensions between the field’s professed beliefs and everyday practices and offers a process by which the writing center discipline as a whole might rebuild itself anew. It will be invaluable to writing center directors, tutors, scholars, and students as well as to administrators and compositionists.
 
[more]
cover of Radicals in the Heartland: The 1960s Student Protest Movement at the University of Illinois

Radicals in the Heartland

The 1960s Student Protest Movement at the University of Illinois

Michael V. Metz

University of Illinois Press, 2019

In 1969, the campus tumult that defined the Sixties reached a flash point at the University of Illinois. Out-of-town radicals preached armed revolution. Students took to the streets and fought police and National Guardsmen. Firebombs were planted in lecture halls while explosions rocked a federal building on one side of town and a recruiting office on the other. Across the state, the powers-that-be expressed shock that such events could take place at Illinois's esteemed, conservative, flagship university—how could it happen here, of all places?

Positioning the events in the context of their time, Michael V. Metz delves into the lives and actions of activists at the center of the drama. A participant himself, Metz draws on interviews, archives, and newspaper records to show a movement born in demands for free speech, inspired by a movement for civil rights, and driven to the edge by a seemingly never-ending war. If the sudden burst of irrational violence baffled parents, administrators, and legislators, it seemed inevitable to students after years of official intransigence and disregard. Metz portrays campus protesters not as angry, militant extremists but as youthful citizens deeply engaged with grave moral issues, embodying the idealism, naiveté, and courage of a minority of a generation.

[more]
cover of Raised at Rutgers: A President's Story

Raised at Rutgers

A President's Story

McCormick, Richard L

Rutgers University Press, 2014

In Raised at Rutgers, Richard L. McCormick tells what it is like to run a major state university and vividly portrays the often contentious environment in which a university president operates today. He unsparingly recounts his decade of leadership, including his own missteps—those we know about and those we didn’t—as he strove to obtain adequate resources for the university, to overhaul the often confusing organization of the New Brunswick campus, to manage the growth and success of intercollegiate athletics, and to deepen Rutgers’s acceptance of its obligations as the state university of New Jersey.

With understandable pride, McCormick recalls and relates Rutgers’s academic achievements during his presidency, including a renewed focus on undergraduate education and a significant increase in funding for research. Most dramatically, he chronicles the University’s protracted efforts to reclaim Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (and ultimately to acquire most of UMDNJ), a goal that was finally realized with crucial help from Governor Chris Christie and former governor Tom Kean.

Among the most honest accounts ever written of a college presidency, Raised at Rutgers takes the reader inside one of the best, and liveliest, public universities in America and highlights many of the most critical issues facing higher education today.
[more]
cover of Raising Ollie: How My Nonbinary Art-Nerd Kid Changed (Nearly) Everything I Know

Raising Ollie

How My Nonbinary Art-Nerd Kid Changed (Nearly) Everything I Know

Tom Rademacher

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

The account of one radically new school year for a Teacher of the Year and for his nonbinary, art-obsessed, brilliant child 

Seven-year-old Ollie was researching local advanced school programs—because every second grader does that, right? Ollie, who used to hate weekends because they meant no school, was crying on the way to school almost every day. Sure, there were the slings and arrows of bullies and bad teachers, but, maybe worse, Ollie, a funny, anxious, smart kid with a thing for choir and an eye for graphic art, was gravely underchallenged and also struggling with identity and how to live totally as themselves. Ollie begged to switch to a new school with “kids like me,” where they wouldn’t feel so alone, or so bored, and so they made the change. 

Raising Ollie is dad Tom Rademacher’s story (really, many stories) of that eventful and sometimes painful school year, parenting Ollie and relearning every day what it means to be a father and teacher. As Ollie—who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, and prefers art to athletics, vegetables to cake, and animals to most humans—flourishes in their new school, Rademacher is making an eye-opening adjustment to a new school of his own, one that’s whiter and more suburban than anywhere he has previously taught, with a history of racial tension that he tries to address and navigate. 

While Ollie is learning to code, 3D model, animate, speak Japanese, and finally feel comfortable at school, Rademacher increasingly sees how his own educational struggles, anxieties, and childhood upbringing are reflected in his teaching, writing, and parenting, as well as in Ollie’s experience. And with this story of one anything-but-academic year of inquiry and wonder, doubt and revelation, he shows us how raising a kid changes everything—and how much raising a kid like Ollie can teach us about who we are and what we’re doing in the world.

[more]
cover of Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917–1950

Raising Secular Jews

Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917–1950

Naomi Prawer Kadar

Brandeis University Press, 2016

This unique literary study of Yiddish children’s periodicals casts new light on secular Yiddish schools in America in the first half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the traditional religious education of the Talmud Torahs and congregational schools, these Yiddish schools chose Yiddish itself as the primary conduit of Jewish identity and culture. Four Yiddish school networks emerged, which despite their political and ideological differences were all committed to propagating the Yiddish language, supporting social justice, and preparing their students for participation in both Jewish and American culture. Focusing on the Yiddish children’s periodicals produced by the Labor Zionist Farband, the secular Sholem Aleichem schools, the socialist Workmen’s Circle, and the Ordn schools of the Communist-aligned International Workers Order, Naomi Kadar shows how secular immigrant Jews sought to pass on their identity and values as they prepared their youth to become full-fledged Americans.
[more]
cover of Rank-and-File Rebels: Theories of Power and Change in the 2018 Education Strikes

Rank-and-File Rebels

Theories of Power and Change in the 2018 Education Strikes

Erin Dyke

University Press of Colorado, 2024

In spring 2018, a wave of rank-and-file rebellion swept schools across the south and southwest United States, among other places. Educators in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona pushed their trade unions, school boards, and school administrations to shut schools down to increase wages, halt rising healthcare costs, and restore public education funding. Despite stringent anti-union labor laws, rank-and-file educators organized on the periphery and sometimes beyond their reticent state unions to take direct action, contributing to a resurgence in educator uprisings across the US and the globe. Rank-and-File Rebels explores and historicizes the spring 2018 “red” state strikes, offering insights into the racial, gendered, and political contexts of educators’ organizing in the lead-up to, during, and soon after the strikes. Through interviews with strike organizers across four states as well as the authors’ own experiences in education labor organizing, this book analyzes theories of power and change, approaches to unionism, and the significance of solidarity and social justice union approaches in contemporary educator labor movements.
[more]
cover of Raza Studies: The Public Option for Educational Revolution

Raza Studies

The Public Option for Educational Revolution

Edited by Julio Cammarota and Augustine Romero; Foreword by David Stovall

University of Arizona Press, 2014

The well-known and controversial Mexican American studies (MAS) program in Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District set out to create an equitable and excellent educational experience for Latino students. Raza Studies: The Public Option for Educational Revolution offers the first comprehensive account of this progressive—indeed revolutionary—program by those who created it, implemented it, and have struggled to protect it.

Inspired by Paulo Freire’s vision for critical pedagogy and Chicano activists of the 1960s, the designers of the program believed their program would encourage academic achievement and engagement by Mexican American students. With chapters by leading scholars, this volume explains how the program used “critically compassionate intellectualism” to help students become “transformative intellectuals” who successfully worked to improve their level of academic achievement, as well as create social change in their schools and communities.

Despite its popularity and success inverting the achievement gap, in 2010 Arizona state legislators introduced and passed legislation with the intent of banning MAS or any similar curriculum in public schools. Raza Studies is a passionate defense of the program in the face of heated local and national attention. It recounts how one program dared to venture to a world of possibility, hope, and struggle, and offers compelling evidence of success for social justice education programs.
[more]
cover of Re-membering Culture: Erasure and Renewal in Hmong American Education

Re-membering Culture

Erasure and Renewal in Hmong American Education

Bic Ngo

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

The untold stories of resilience in Hmong American education

Re-membering Culture is a deep exploration of the intricate dynamics of cultural memory and education, centering the experiences of Hmong American students and educators. Arguing that the school, as a product of coloniality, perpetuates the marginalization and erasure of non-Western epistemologies, author Bic Ngo sheds light on the subtle yet impactful process of structured forgetting within the American education system. This politics of forgetting, in turn, contributes to the fragmentation of Hmong cultural heritage, identity, and community.

Based on a high school in an urban center with a considerable Hmong immigrant community, Ngo’s work draws on extensive ethnographic research with Hmong American community leaders, school administrators, parents, teachers, staff, and high school students to understand how they navigate the terrain of Western pedagogy while attempting to retain and preserve Hmong knowledge systems. Exploring a range of school experiences, Ngo traverses students’ challenges in balancing school with family life and the everyday cultural racism encountered in the classroom as well as grassroots efforts to preserve culture, including the establishment of a Hmong Cultural Club.

Highlighting these experiences and voices, Ngo provides a nuanced understanding of the challenges Hmong Americans face within an assimilationist society while contesting the dominant anti-immigrant narratives of refugee suffering and poverty. Through these practices of (re)storytelling, resurgence, and refusal, she underscores the agency of the Hmong American community, illuminating how the critical consciousness fostered by re-membering serves as a powerful tool in confronting white hegemonic ideologies in education.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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cover of Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education

Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone

Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education

Thomas J. Tobin

West Virginia University Press, 2018

Advocates for the rights of people with disabilities have worked hard to make universal design in the built environment “just part of what we do.” We no longer see curb cuts, for instance, as accommodations for people with disabilities, but perceive their usefulness every time we ride our bikes or push our strollers through crosswalks.

This is also a perfect model for Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework grounded in the neuroscience of why, what, and how people learn. Tobin and Behling show that, although it is often associated with students with disabilities, UDL can be profitably broadened toward a larger ease-of-use and general diversity framework. Captioned instructional videos, for example, benefit learners with hearing impairments but also the student who worries about waking her young children at night or those studying on a noisy team bus.

Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone is aimed at faculty members, faculty-service staff, disability support providers, student-service staff, campus leaders, and graduate students who want to strengthen the engagement, interaction, and performance of all college students. It includes resources for readers who want to become UDL experts and advocates: real-world case studies, active-learning techniques, UDL coaching skills, micro- and macro-level UDL-adoption guidance, and use-them-now resources.

[more]
cover of Reaching All Writers: A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving College Writing Classrooms

Reaching All Writers

A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving College Writing Classrooms

Joanne Baird Giordano

Utah State University Press, 2023

Reaching All Writers brings together decades of writing studies experience, research, and scholarship to help organize first-year writing courses around inclusive teaching practices and foundational concepts that support disciplinary learning for all college writers, including students who have been excluded from more selective higher-education institutions.
 
Using threshold concepts and transfer as a foundation, the authors provide an invaluable resource for multiple contexts: instructors working off the tenure track and/or at multiple institutions; two-year college programs without a writing program administrator; and writing program graduate teaching assistant training courses. Each chapter includes an overview of a threshold concept, disciplinary background readings, practical teaching strategies, assignment and learning activity ideas, assessment principles, examples from student and instructor perspectives, and questions for reflection and discussion.
 
Reaching All Writers describes effective teaching practices to help all college writing instructors, regardless of their institutional contexts, make changes that support equitable and inclusive learning opportunities—with a focus on teaching students whose backgrounds and learning experiences are different from those with more educational or economic privilege. Both new and experienced teachers adapting first-year college writing courses will find the book’s blend of practical strategies and disciplinary knowledge a useful companion for facilitating new classroom and program needs or designing new teaching assistant training courses.
 
[more]
cover of Read and Tell Stories: For parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other loving adults

Read and Tell Stories

For parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other loving adults

Rosie Cutrer

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2020

A handbook for adults who want to pass on family stories to children in their clan, also useful for elementary and middle school teachers, grandparents, faith educators, and day care programmers
[more]
cover of Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric

Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie

The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric

LuMing Mao

Utah State University Press, 2006

ecent scholarship tends to explain such influences as contributing to language hybridity---an advance over the traditional "deficit model." But Mao suggests that the "hybridity" approach is perhaps too arid or sanitized, missing rich nuances of mutual exchange, resistance, or even subversion. Through his concept of "togetherness in difference, Mao suggests that speakers of hybrid discourse may not be attempting the standard (and failing), but instead may be deliberately importing cultural material to create a distance between themselves and the standard. This practice, over time, becomes a process that transforms English, enriching and enlarging it through the infusion of non-Western discourse features, subverting power structures, and even providing unique humorous touches.

Of interest to scholars in composition, cultural studies, and linguistics as well, Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie leads in an important new direction for both our understanding and our teaching of English.

[more]
cover of Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845

Reading Prisoners

Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845

Schorb, Jodi

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Shining new light on early American prison literature—from its origins in last words, dying warnings, and gallows literature to its later works of autobiography, exposé, and imaginative literature—Reading Prisoners weaves together insights about the rise of the early American penitentiary, the history of early American literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime writing in the “long” eighteenth century. 

Looking first at colonial America—an era often said to devalue jailhouse literacy—Jodi Schorb reveals that in fact this era launched the literate prisoner into public prominence. Criminal confessions published between 1700 and 1740, she shows, were crucial “literacy events” that sparked widespread public fascination with the reading habits of the condemned, consistent with the evangelical revivalism that culminated in the first Great Awakening. By century’s end, narratives by condemned criminals helped an audience of new writers navigate the perils and promises of expanded literacy.

Schorb takes us off the scaffold and inside the private world of the first penitentiaries—such as Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison and New York’s Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing. She unveils the long and contentious struggle over the value of prisoner education that ultimately led to sporadic efforts to supply prisoners with books and education. Indeed, a new philosophy emerged, one that argued that prisoners were best served by silence and hard labor, not by reading and writing—a stance that a new generation of convict authors vociferously protested.

The staggering rise of mass incarceration in America since the 1970s has brought the issue of prisoner rehabilitation once again to the fore. Reading Prisoners offers vital background to the ongoing, crucial debates over the benefits of prisoner education.
[more]
cover of Reading Randomised Controlled Trials: Opening the Book

Reading Randomised Controlled Trials

Opening the Book

Robert Savage, Amy Fox, Anneka Dawson, Helen Gray, and Clare Huxley

University College London, 2025

A behind-the-scenes look at a large-scale reading intervention trial, exposing the human decisions and real-world challenges that shape educational research.

Reading Randomised Controlled Trials presents an illuminating exploration of how large-scale educational trials unfold in real-world settings, displaying the often-overlooked human decisions that shape their outcomes. Using the Flexible Phonics trial—an ambitious study involving nearly 3,000 children in 118 schools across England—as a case study, the authors examine the practical and ethical problems with conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in education. Unlike pharmaceutical trials, educational RCTs operate in dynamic environments where factors such as teacher decision-making and school culture play a crucial role.

This book depicts the inner workings of education research and also underlines its broader significance, particularly in the wake of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. By focusing on early childhood literacy and the long-term impact of evidence-based interventions, Reading Randomised Controlled Trials provides important insights for educators and researchers seeking to bridge the gap between rigorous research and meaningful classroom practice. A must-read for those invested in improving educational outcomes, this book contests assumptions about what works in education—and why.
[more]
cover of Reading Skills for Success: A Guide to Academic Texts

Reading Skills for Success

A Guide to Academic Texts

Thomas A. Upton and Katherine W. Brinkmeyer

University of Michigan Press, 2026

In this new edition, Reading Skills for Success continues to help students develop the reading skills and strategies they need to transition to reading material in mainstream academic settings. Designed for precollege readers and nonnative speakers of English alike, the fully revised book focuses on the text-based, linguistic preparedness necessary to quickly spot key information and organizational structure in texts and avoid miscomprehension.

Written by academic experts who are practicing teachers in ESL intensive English, the book is grounded in sound pedagogical methods. Teachers will work through specific reading strategies with students; use the general activities and sample academic chapters in the book to practice the strategies being taught; and then have the students turn to outside readings, like their academic textbooks, to practice the strategies they are learning. Accessible for teachers and students, Reading Skills for Success provides a guide for developing text-based processing skills to improve reading confidence.

In Reading Skills for Success, 2nd Edition, students will:

  • Learn to use word-level clues to increase reading comprehension.
  • Recognize different types of expository text structures.
  • Develop study skills for intensive analytical reading of academic prose.
  • Practice reading strategies for in-depth, long-term understanding of complex academic texts.
  • Apply skills to excerpts from actual textbooks used in first-year college courses representing a wide variety of fields in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

CEFR level: A1-B1
 

[more]
cover of Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1870

Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction

The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1870

Robert C. Morris

University of Chicago Press, 1981

This study of education for freedmen following Emancipation is the definitive treatment of the subject. Employing a wide range of sources, Robert C. Morris examines the organizations that staffed and managed black schools in the South, with particular attention paid to the activities of the Freedman’s Bureau. He looks as well at those who came to teach, a diverse group—white, black, Northern, Southern—and at the curricula and textbooks they used. While giving special emphasis to the Freedmen’s Bureau school program, Morris places the freedmen’s educational movement fully in its nineteenth-century context, relating it both to the antislavery crusade that preceded it and to the conservative era of race relations that followed.

[more]
cover of Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas

Reading, Writing, and Revolution

Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas

By Philis M. Barragán Goetz

University of Texas Press, 2020

2022 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award
Tejas Foco Non-fiction Book Award, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
2021 Tejano Book Prize, Tejano Genealogy Society of Austin
2021 Jim Parish Award for Documentation and Publication of Local and Regional History, Webb County Heritage Foundation
2021 Runner-up, Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book

The first book on the history of escuelitas, Reading, Writing, and Revolution examines the integral role these grassroots community schools played in shaping Mexican American identity.

Language has long functioned as a signifier of power in the United States. In Texas, as elsewhere in the Southwest, ethnic Mexicans’ relationship to education—including their enrollment in the Spanish-language community schools called escuelitas—served as a vehicle to negotiate that power. Situating the history of escuelitas within the contexts of modernization, progressivism, public education, the Mexican Revolution, and immigration, Reading, Writing, and Revolution traces how the proliferation and decline of these community schools helped shape Mexican American identity.

Philis M. Barragán Goetz argues that the history of escuelitas is not only a story of resistance in the face of Anglo hegemony but also a complex and nuanced chronicle of ethnic Mexican cultural negotiation. She shows how escuelitas emerged and thrived to meet a diverse set of unfulfilled needs, then dwindled as later generations of Mexican Americans campaigned for educational integration. Drawing on extensive archival, genealogical, and oral history research, Barragán Goetz unravels a forgotten narrative at the crossroads of language and education as well as race and identity.

[more]
cover of Readings in Primary Art Education

Readings in Primary Art Education

Edited by Steve Herne, Sue Cox, and Robert Watts

Intellect Books, 2009

Readings in Primary Art Education focuses on the challenges of and approaches to teaching art to primary-school students. Drawn from articles originally published in the International Journal of Art and Design, this volume gathers the work of the best scholars in the field and provides a critical framework for developing methods of teaching art to young students. Capturing the key issues and debates that are shaping both curricula and practice, Readings in Primary Art Education is an essential starting point for anyone involved in art education. This collection of essays will be a welcome addition to art and design education and will be of interest to those active in primary art and design education, including practicing teachers and scholars.

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cover of Realizing Educational Rights: Advancing School Reform through Courts and Communities

Realizing Educational Rights

Advancing School Reform through Courts and Communities

Anne Newman

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In Realizing Educational Rights, Anne Newman examines two educational rights questions that arise at the intersection of political theory, educational policy, and law: What is the place of a right to education in a participatory democracy, and how can we realize this right in the United States? Tracking these questions across both philosophical and pragmatic terrain, she addresses urgent moral and political questions, offering a rare, double-pronged look at educational justice in a democratic society.

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. 
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cover of Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now

Reasons and Feelings

Writing for the Humanities Now

Sarah Mesle

University of Chicago Press, 2025

This book of practical writing and publishing advice celebrates the creative, community-building pleasures of humanist expertise.

Humanities experts today are embattled. In a world of crises undermining higher education at every turn, what can still motivate humanists to write? Galvanizing, imaginative, and unrepentantly nerdy, Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feeling offers practical writing and publishing advice alongside a forcefully affirmative account of why humanities writing matters.

Mesle proposes that writing can help envision sustainable community, but only when we recognize that humanist authority comes from both our reasons and our feelings. Alongside everyday compositional advice—including strategies for addressing different audiences, pitching publications, and managing writing anxiety—readers will find an account of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how university-trained writers at all levels benefit from embracing a broader range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing’s community-building potential and makes them better able to value their own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues, or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche, weird, or beloved, objects of study.

Reasons and Feelings draws on Mesle’s expertise as a professor of writing and her work as an editor helping academics shift between writing for scholarly venues and journalistic ones. In a voice that’s honest, warm, accessible, and bracingly funny, Reasons and Feelings gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds their writing can make.
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cover of Rebuilding Public Confidence in Educational Assessment

Rebuilding Public Confidence in Educational Assessment

Mary Richardson

University College London, 2022

Reassessing educational assessment: how the way we talk about exams and grades exacerbates the problems of pressure, anxiety, and expectation.

Educational assessment is important. Yet it is easy to feel that schooling and other phases of education are shaped entirely by certain assessments and that assessment is only about exam results. The idea that grades can accurately describe the aims and outcomes of education is both reductive and pervasive. This book is about the stories we tell each other about educational assessment and how they impact public trust and confidence in educational assessment. It explains the roots and nature of assessment discourses and proposes a restructuring of the debate to rebuild public confidence. It aims to challenge dominant assessment discourses and demands a more nuanced, informed debate about what happens in and beyond schools, and how this influences public thinking. Using examples from international settings to explore the nature of trust in assessment discourses, this book shows how these discourses can be reframed so that all aspects of the assessment system—policymaking, school planning, home practice with students—can be delivered with confidence.
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cover of Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law: Kinamaadiwin Inaakonigewin and the Treaty Right to Education

Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law

Kinamaadiwin Inaakonigewin and the Treaty Right to Education

Leo Baskatawang

University of Manitoba Press, 2023

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Reclaiming Class

Women, Poverty, And The Promise

edited by Vivyan C. Adair and Sandra L. Dahlberg

Temple University Press, 2003

Reclaiming Class offers essays written by women who changed their lives through the pathway of higher education. Collected, they offer a powerful testimony of the importance of higher learning, as well as a critique of the programs designed to alleviate poverty and educational disparity. The contributors explore the ideologies of welfare and American meritocracy that promise hope and autonomy on the one hand, while also perpetuating economic obstacles and indebtedness on the other. Divided into the three sections, Reclaiming Class assesses the psychological, familial, and economic intersections of poverty and the educational process. In the first section, women who left poverty through higher education recall their negotiating the paths of college life to show how their experiences reveal the hidden paradoxes of education. Section two presents first person narratives of students whose lives are shaped by their roles as poor mothers, guardian siblings, and daughters, as well as the ways that race interacts with their poverty. Chapters exploring financial aid and welfare policy, battery and abuse, and the social constructions of the poor woman finish the book. Offering a comprehensive picture of how poor women access all levels of private and public institutions to achieve against great odds, Reclaiming Class shows the workings of higher learning from the vantage point of those most subject to the vicissitudes of policy and reform agendas.
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cover of Reclaiming Indigenous Research in Higher Education

Reclaiming Indigenous Research in Higher Education

Minthorn, Robin Starr

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Indigenous students remain one of the least represented populations in higher education. They continue to account for only one percent of the total post-secondary student population, and this lack of representation is felt in multiple ways beyond enrollment. Less research money is spent studying Indigenous students, and their interests are often left out of projects that otherwise purport to address diversity in higher education. 

Recently, Native scholars have started to reclaim research through the development of their own research methodologies and paradigms that are based in tribal knowledge systems and values, and that allow inherent Indigenous knowledge and lived experiences to strengthen the research. Reclaiming Indigenous Research in Higher Education highlights the current scholarship emerging from these scholars of higher education. From understanding how Native American students make their way through school, to tracking tribal college and university transfer students, this book allows Native scholars to take center stage, and shines the light squarely on those least represented among us.  
 
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cover of Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy

Reclaiming the Rural

Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy

Edited by Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell

Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

In Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy, editors Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell bring together a diverse collection of essays that consider literacy, rhetoric, and pedagogy in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The essays move beyond the typical arguments for preserving, abandoning, or modernizing by analyzing how rural communities sustain themselves through literate action. The contributors explore the rhetorics of water disputes in the western United States, the histories and influences of religious rhetorics in Mexico, agricultural and rural literacy curricula, the literacies of organizations such as 4-H and Academia de la Nueva Raza, and neoliberal rhetorics. Central to these examinations are the rural populations themselves, which include indigenous peoples in the rural United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as those of European or other backgrounds.

The strength of the anthology lies in its multiple perspectives, various research sites, and the range of methodologies employed, including rhetorical analyses of economies and environments, media, and public spaces; classroom-based research; historical analysis and archival work; and qualitative research. The researchers engage the duality between the practices of everyday life in rural communities and the practices of reflecting on and making meaning.

Reclaiming the Rural reflects the continually changing, nuanced, context-dependent realities of rural life while acknowledging the complex histories, power struggles, and governmental actions that have affected and continue to affect the lives of rural citizens. This thought-provoking collection demonstrates the value in reclaiming the rural for scholarly and pedagogical analysis.

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