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12 books match the query 'Education, Secondary'

cover of Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction

Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction

Ralph W. Tyler

University of Chicago Press, 2013

The most important guide for anyone working on curriculum development

Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction has been the standard in the field for decades, and it continues to be the leading guide to curriculum development today. Ralph W. Tyler presents here the concept that curriculum should be dynamic, a program under constant evaluation and revision. Before the publication of this book, curriculum had generally been thought of as a static, set program, and in an era preoccupied with student testing, he offered the innovative idea that teachers and administrators should spend as much time evaluating their plans as they do assessing their students.

Although not a strict how-to guide, the book shows how educators can critically approach curriculum planning, studying progress and retooling when needed. Its four sections focus on setting objectives, selecting learning experiences, organizing instruction, and evaluating progress. Readers will come away with a firm understanding of how to formulate educational objectives and how to analyze and adjust their plans so that students meet the objectives. Tyler also explains that curriculum planning is a continuous, cyclical process, an instrument of education that needs to be fine-tuned.

This emphasis on thoughtful evaluation has kept Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction a relevant, trusted companion for decades. Even as the educational landscape changes and teachers and administrators have to adjust to new developments in testing, student engagement, regulation, and more, the core principles animating this book remain as valid and effective as ever.  And with school districts across the nation working to align their curriculum with Common Core standards, Tyler's straightforward recommendations are sound and effective tools for educators working to create a curriculum that integrates national objectives with their students' needs.
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cover of Beautiful Struggle: How One American High School Took on Systemic Racism

Beautiful Struggle

How One American High School Took on Systemic Racism

Sharon M. Chubbuck and Cynthia M. Ellwood

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An in-depth look at how one high school addressed racial inequality head-on.

The new superintendent stood before the faculty of “Oakmont High,” a large, diverse public school, and spoke a cold truth about American education. He described seeing the vibrant mix of students in the school’s hallways disperse into racially segregated classrooms when the bell rang. The fact was that students were sorted into tracks—supposedly race-neutral, “ability-based” pathways—that led to sharply unequal experiences and opportunities throughout high school and often their whole lives. “Why is it fair for white kids to have a better education than Black kids?” the superintendent asked his faculty. “It’s racism pure and simple, and it’s going to stop!” 

Racial inequality persists because racism is systemic, baked into countless interlacing beliefs, practices, and structures that make up the way we do school. Tracking is one of many such practices. In Beautiful Struggle, Sharon M. Chubbuck and Cynthia M. Ellwood examine eleven years of transformation by administrators, teachers, students, and others as they tackled systemic racism head-on, starting with tracking. The people of OHS encountered intense resistance and made extraordinary inroads. They fought inequality with hard conversations and concrete steps. They dramatically increased Black and brown students’ access to rich, rigorous learning from the moment students entered as freshmen. They questioned and restructured the interconnected web of policy and practices in every aspect of the school. Students themselves propelled major changes in academic opportunity and the very culture of the school.

Chubbuck and Ellwood argue that taking on racial inequality requires an unrelenting focus on racial justice, challenging systems on every front, broad collective leadership across race and role, and the will to navigate difference and conflict. The story within Beautiful Struggle offers a hopeful though sobering path forward.

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cover of Betting on Education: The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth

Betting on Education

The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth

Jennifer Estes

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Educational credentials are one of the most reliable tickets to a middle-class livelihood across the globe today. But as the costs of schooling rise, young people increasingly wonder whether their investment will pay off. Betting on Education: The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth follows the experiences of rural secondary school students navigating Cambodia’s semiprivatized state education system. It reveals that when students are compelled to speculate about the value of their education, the “winners” of this gamble are the ones already most securely part of the middle class. The rest are left behind. In the process, the very meaning of education is transformed, as schooling becomes less about learning and more about its potential financial returns. By situating these stories in the wider global logics of neoliberal capitalism, Betting on Education challenges readers to consider what is at stake when young people must wager so much on the promise of schooling.

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cover of Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools

Brothers in Grief

The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools

Nora Gross

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A heartbreaking account of grief, Black boyhood, and how we can support young people as they navigate loss.
 
JahSun, a dependable, much-loved senior at Boys’ Prep was just hitting his stride in the fall of 2017. He had finally earned a starting position on the varsity football team and was already weighing two college acceptances. Then, over Thanksgiving, tragedy struck. An altercation at his older sister’s home escalated into violence, killing the unarmed teenager in a hail of bullets. JahSun’s untimely death overwhelmed his entire community, sending his family, friends, and school into seemingly insurmountable grief. Worse yet, that spring two additional Boys’ Prep students would be shot to death in their neighborhood. JahSun and his peers are not alone in suffering the toll of gun violence, as every year in the United States teenagers die by gunfire in epidemic numbers, with Black boys most deeply affected.

Brothers in Grief closely attends to the neglected victims of youth gun violence: the suffering friends and classmates who must cope, mostly out of public view, with lasting grief and hidden anguish. Set at an ambitious urban high school for boys during the heartbreaking year following the death of JahSun, the book chronicles the consequences of untimely death on Black teen boys and on a school community struggling to recover. Sociologist Nora Gross tells the story of students attempting to grapple with unthinkable loss, inviting readers in to observe how they move through their days at school and on social media in the aftermath of their friends’ and classmates’ deaths. Gross highlights the discrepancy between their school’s educational mission and teachers’ and administrators’ fraught attempts to care for students’ emotional wellbeing. In the end, the school did not provide adequate space for grief, making it more difficult for students to heal, reengage with school, and imagine hopeful futures. Even so, supportive relationships deepened among students and formed across generations, offering promising examples of productive efforts to channel student grief into positive community change.

A searing testimony of our collective failure to understand the inner lives of our children in crisis, Brothers in Grief invites us all to wrestle with the hidden costs of gun violence on racial and educational inequity.
 
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cover of COMPUGIRLS: How Girls of Color Find and Define Themselves in the Digital Age

COMPUGIRLS

How Girls of Color Find and Define Themselves in the Digital Age

Kimberly A. Scott

University of Illinois Press, 2021

What does is it mean for girls of color to become techno-social change agents--individuals who fuse technological savvy with a deep understanding of society in order to analyze and confront inequality?

Kimberly A. Scott explores this question and others as she details the National Science Foundation-funded enrichment project COMPUGIRLS. This groundbreaking initiative teaches tech skills to adolescent girls of color but, as importantly, offers a setting that emphasizes empowerment, community advancement, and self-discovery. Scott draws on her experience as an architect of COMPUGIRLS to detail the difficulties of translating participants' lives into a digital context while tracing how the program evolved. The dramatic stories of the participants show them blending newly developed technical and communication skills in ways designed to spark effective action and bring about important change.

A compelling merger of theory and storytelling, COMPUGIRLS provides a much-needed roadmap for understanding how girls of color can find and define their selves in today's digital age.

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cover of Class Warfare: Class, Race, and College Admissions in Top-Tier Secondary Schools

Class Warfare

Class, Race, and College Admissions in Top-Tier Secondary Schools

Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, and Heather Jenkins

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Stories abound about the lengths to which middle- and upper-middle-class parents will go to ensure a spot for their child at a prestigious university. From the Suzuki method to calculus-based physics, from AP tests all the way back to early-learning Kumon courses, students are increasingly pushed to excel with that Harvard or Yale acceptance letter held tantalizingly in front of them. And nowhere is this drive more apparent than in our elite secondary schools. In Class Warfare, Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, and Heather Jenkins go inside the ivy-yearning halls of three such schools to offer a day-to-day, week-by-week look at this remarkable drive toward college admissions and one of its most salient purposes: to determine class.
             
Drawing on deep and sustained contact with students, parents, teachers, and administrators at three iconic secondary schools in the United States, the authors unveil a formidable process of class positioning at the heart of the college admissions process. They detail the ways students and parents exploit every opportunity and employ every bit of cultural, social, and economic capital they can in order to gain admission into a “Most Competitive” or “Highly Competitive Plus” university. Moreover, they show how admissions into these schools—with their attendant rankings—are used to lock in or improve class standing for the next generation. It’s a story of class warfare within a given class, the substrata of which—whether economically, racially, or socially determined—are fiercely negotiated through the college admissions process.
In a historic moment marked by deep economic uncertainty, anxieties over socioeconomic standing are at their highest. Class, as this book shows, must be won, and the collateral damage of this aggressive pursuit may just be education itself, flattened into a mere victory banner.  
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cover of Making a Mass Institution: Indianapolis and the American High School

Making a Mass Institution

Indianapolis and the American High School

Kyle P. Steele

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Making a Mass Institution describes how Indianapolis, Indiana created a divided and unjust system of high schools over the course of the twentieth century, one that effectively sorted students geographically, economically, and racially. Like most U.S. cities, Indianapolis began its secondary system with a singular, decidedly academic high school, but ended the 1960s with multiple high schools with numerous paths to graduation. Some of the schools were academic, others vocational, and others still for what was eventually called “life adjustment.” This system mirrored the multiple forces of mass society that surrounded it, as it became more bureaucratic, more focused on identifying and organizing students based on perceived abilities, and more anxious about teaching conformity to middle-class values. By highlighting the experiences of the students themselves and the formation of a distinct, school-centered youth culture, Kyle P. Steele argues that high school, as it evolved into a mass institution, was never fully the domain of policy elites, school boards and administrators, or students, but a complicated and ever-changing contested meeting place of all three.
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cover of Professional Communities and the Work of High School Teaching

Professional Communities and the Work of High School Teaching

Milbrey W. McLaughlin and Joan E. Talbert

University of Chicago Press, 2001

American high schools have never been under more pressure to reform: student populations are more diverse than ever, resources are limited, and teachers are expected to teach to high standards for all students. While many reformers look for change at the state or district level, the authors here argue that the most local contexts—schools, departments, and communities—matter the most to how well teachers perform in the classroom and how satisfied they are professionally. Their findings—based on one of the most extensive research projects ever done on secondary teaching—show that departmental cultures play a crucial role in classroom settings and expectations. In the same school, for example, social studies teachers described their students as "apathetic and unwilling to work," while English teachers described the same students as "bright, interesting, and energetic."

With wide-ranging implications for educational practice and policy, this unprecedented look into teacher communities is essential reading for educators, administrators, and all those concerned with U. S. High Schools.
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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 Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America

Teaching in the Terrordome

Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America

Heather Kirn Lanier

University of Missouri Press, 2012

Only 50 percent of kids growing up in poverty will earn a high school diploma. Just one in ten will graduate college. Compelled by these troubling statistics, Heather Kirn Lanier joined Teach For America (TFA), a program that thrusts eager but inexperienced college graduates into America’s most impoverished areas to teach, asking them to do whatever is necessary to catch their disadvantaged kids up to the rest of the nation. 
            With little more than a five-week teacher boot camp and the knowledge that David Simon referred to her future school as “The Terrordome,” the altruistic and naïve Lanier devoted herself to attaining the program’s goals but met obstacles on all fronts. The building itself was in such poor condition that tiles fell from the ceiling at random. Kids from the halls barged into classes all day, disrupting even the most carefully planned educational activities. In the middle of one lesson, a wandering student lit her classroom door on fire. Some colleagues, instantly suspicious of TFA’s intentions, withheld their help and supplies. (“They think you’re trying to ‘save’ the children,” one teacher said.) And though high school students can be by definition resistant, in west Baltimore they threw eggs, slashed tires, and threatened teachers’ lives. Within weeks, Lanier realized that the task she was charged with—achieving quantifiable gains in her students’ learning—would require something close to a miracle. 
            Superbly written and timely, Teaching in the Terrordome casts an unflinching gaze on one of America’s “dropout factory” high schools. Though Teach For America often touts its most successful teacher stories, Lanier’s powerful memoir illuminates a more common experience of “Teaching For America” with thoughtful complexity, a poet’s eye, and an engaging voice. As hard as Lanier worked to become a competent teacher, she found that in “The Terrordome”, idealism wasn’t enough. To persevere, she had to rely on grit, humility, a little comedy, and a willingness to look failure in the face. As she adjusted to a chaotic school administration, crumbling facilities, burned-out colleagues, and students who perceived their school for the failure it was, she gained perspective on the true state of the crisis TFA sets out to solve. Ultimately, she discovered that contrary to her intentions, survival in the so-called Charm City was a high expectation.
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cover of The Color of Strangers, the Color of Friends

The Color of Strangers, the Color of Friends

Alan Peshkin

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Peshkin examines the role played by ethnicity in the daily life of a town he calls "Riverview" and its only high school. Immersing himself in the daily life of halls and classrooms of Riverview's high school and the streets of its neighborhoods, Peshkin coaxes from both young and old their own reflections on the town's early days, on the period of ethnic strife sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and on the way they see Riverview today.

"Peshkin strikes a hopeful chord, revealing what social encounters among ethnic groups—at their best—can be like in America."—Education Digest
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cover of We Are All Equal: Student Culture and Identity at a Mexican Secondary School, 1988–1998

We Are All Equal

Student Culture and Identity at a Mexican Secondary School, 1988–1998

Bradley A. U. Levinson

Duke University Press, 2001

We Are All Equal is the first full-length ethnography of a Mexican secondary school available in English. Bradley A. U. Levinson observes student life at a provincial Mexican junior high, often drawing on poignant and illuminating interviews, to study how the the school’s powerful emphasis on equality, solidarity, and group unity dissuades the formation of polarized peer groups and affects students’ eventual life trajectories.
Exploring how students develop a cultural “game of equality” that enables them to identify—across typical class and social boundaries—with their peers, the school, and the nation, Levinson considers such issues as the organizational and discursive resources that students draw on to maintain this culture. He also engages cultural studies, media studies, and globalization theory to examine the impact of television, music, and homelife on the students and thereby better comprehend—and problematize—the educational project of the state. Finding that an ethic of solidarity is sometimes used to condemn students defined as different or uncooperative and that little attention is paid to accommodating the varied backgrounds of the students—including their connection to indigenous, peasant, or working class identities—Levinson reveals that their “schooled identity” often collapses in the context of migration to the United States or economic crisis in Mexico. Finally, he extends his study to trace whether the cultural game is reinforced or eroded after graduation as well as its influence relative to the forces of family, traditional gender roles, church, and global youth culture.
We Are All Equal will be of particular interest to educators, sociologists, Latin Americanists, and anthropologists.
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