In this fiercely intelligent yet accessible book, one of the nation's leading sociologists and experts on race calls for "another kind of public education"--one that opens up more possibilities for democracy, and more powerful modes of participation for young people of color.

. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.

Discusses how school choice, misapplied standards of accountability, the No Child Left Behind mandate, and the use of a corporate model have all led to a decline in public education and presents arguments for a return to strong neighborhood schools and quality teaching.

This book offers a highly revealing and troubling view of today's high school students and the ways they pursue high grades and success. Denise Pope, veteran teacher and curriculum expert, follows five motivated and successful students through a school year, closely shadowing them and engaging them in lengthy reflections on their school experiences. What emerges is a double-sided picture of school success. On the one hand, these students work hard in school, participate in extracurricular activities, serve their communities, earn awards and honours, and appear to uphold school values. But on the other hand, they feel that in order to get ahead they must compromise their values and manipulate the system by scheming, lying, and cheating. In short, they do school, that is, they are not really engaged with learning nor can they commit to such values as integrity and community. The words and actions of these five students - two boys and three girls from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds - underscore the frustrations of being caught in a grade trap that pins future success to high grades and test scores. Their stories raise critical questions that are too important for parents, educators, and community leaders to ignore. Are schools cultivating an environment that promotes intellectual curiosity, cooperation, and integrity? Or are they fostering anxiety, deception, and hostility? Do today's schools inadvertently impede the very values they claim to embrace? Is the success that current assessment practices measure the kind of success we want for our children?

Grounded in the life experiences of children, youth, teachers, and caregivers, this book investigates how implicit bias affects multiracial kids in unforeseen ways. Drawing on critical mixed-race theory and developmental psychology, the authors employ radical listening to examine both how these children experience school and what schools can do to create more welcoming learning environments. They examine how the silencing of mixed-race experiences often creates a barrier to engaging in nuanced conversations about race and identity in the classroom, and how teachers are finding powerful ways to forge meaningful connections with their mixed-race students. This is a book written from the inside, integrating not only theory and research but also the authors’ own experiences negotiating race and racism for and with their mixed-race children. It is a timely and essential read not only because of our nation’s changing demographics, but also because of our racially hostile political climate. Book Features: Examination of the most contemporary issues that impact mixed-race children and youth, including the racialized violence with which our country is now reckoning.Guided exercises with relevant, action-oriented information for educators, parents, and caregivers in every chapter.Engaging storytelling that brings the school worlds of mixed-race children and youth to life.Interdisciplinary scholarship from social and developmental psychology, critical mixed-race studies, and education. Expansion of the typical Black/White binary to include mixed-race children from Asian American, Latinx, and Native American backgrounds.

With over 70,000 copies of the first edition in print, this radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers’ bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years in New York City’s public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine. This second edition describes the wide-spread impact of the book and Gatto’s "guerrilla teaching." John Gatto has been a teacher for 30 years and is a recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award. His other titles include A Different Kind of Teacher (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001) and The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2000).

This book discusses current market-based educational discourses and how they have undermined the notion of “the public” in public education by allowing private visions of education to define the public democratic imagination. Against this discouraging background, this text embraces Freire’s understanding of hope as an ontological need and calls for finding new public grounds for our public imagination. It further articulates Freire’s mandate to unveil historically concrete practices to sustain democratic educational visions, no matter how difficult this task may be, by (1) presenting an indepth description of the pedagogies and curriculums of eleven schools across historical and geographical locations that have worked or are still working with disenfranchised communities and that have publicly hoped for a better future for their students, and by (2) reflecting on how the stories of these schools offer us new opportunities to rethink our own pedagogical commitment to public visions of education. To promote this reflection, this book offers the notion of publicly imagined public education as a conceptual tool to help understand the historical and discursive specificity of schools’ hopes and to (re)claim public schools as legitimate sites of public imagination.