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Undocumented in the U.S. South is a rare look into the everyday realities of undocumented youth in K-12 public schools. In an anti-immigrant policy context, youth and their families navigate historical and current legacies and realities of segregation, racial discrimination, and inequality. With a deep three-year ethnographic study, hundreds of hours of observational research, interviews, and policy analysis, Sophia Rodriguez traces the lives of undocumented youth across multiple public school settings. Her research underscores how these youth are racialized through state policies, school and organizational practices, and everyday interactions with educators and peers. As the first study of its kind to combine this unique framework for analysis, Undocumented in the U.S. South sheds light on the challenges youth face in their everyday struggle to belong. Rodriguez invites us to consider youth experiences as central knowledge for improving educators’ awareness and school practice, while promoting policies that are humanizing and rooted in youth experience.

High-achieving students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to end up at less selective institutions compared to their socioeconomically advantaged peers with similar academic qualifications. A key reason for this is that few highly able, socioeconomically disadvantaged students apply to selective institutions in the first place. In Unequal Choices, Yang Va Lor examines the college application choices of high-achieving students, looking closely at the ways the larger contexts of family, school, and community influence their decisions. For students today, contexts like high schools and college preparation programs shape the type of colleges that they deem appropriate, while family upbringing and personal experiences influence how far from home students imagine they can apply to college. Additionally, several mechanisms reinforce the reproduction of social inequality, showing how institutions and families of the middle and upper-middle class work to procure advantages by cultivating dispositions among their children for specific types of higher education opportunities.

The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K–12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Aaron Blackwelder
Susan D. Blum
Arthur Chiaravalli
Gary Chu
Cathy N. Davidson
Laura Gibbs
Christina Katopodis
Joy Kirr
Alfie Kohn
Christopher Riesbeck
Starr Sackstein
Marcus Schultz-Bergin
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh
Jesse Stommel
John Warner

Unlikely Heroes is a gripping and readable account of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the watershed 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended racially segregated schools. The "unlikely heroes" whose lives and decisions that Jack Bass traces are the federal judges—primarily on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—who vigorously and skillfully implemented the Brown decision in six southern states. These rich profiles show the character of the men who gave up prosperous lives, popularity, and friends to see that the constitutional rights of all U.S. citizens were protected.