In his latest book, leading educator and author Kevin Kumashiro takes aim at the current debate on educational reform, paying particular attention to the ways that scapegoating public school teachers, teacher unions, and teacher educators masks the real, systemic problems. He convincingly demonstrates how current trends, like market-based reforms and fast-track teacher certification programs are creating overwhelming obstacles to achieving an equitable education for all children. Bad Teacher! highlights the common ways that both the public and influential leaders think about the problems and solutions for public education, and suggests ways to help us see the bigger picture and reframe the debate. Compelling, accessible, and grounded in current initiatives and debates, this book is important reading for a diverse audience of policymakers, school leaders, parents, and everyone who cares about education. Kevin K. Kumashiro is director of the Center for Anti-Oppressive Education and president-elect (2010–2012) of the National Association for Multicultural Education. He is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of The Seduction of Common Sense: How the Right Has Framed the Debate on America's Schools. Praise for Bad Teacher! “This book could be a springboard for teachers . . . to become more actively involved in advocating for a paradigm shift in our concept of education.” —Grace Lee Boggs, The Boggs Center “Kumashiro is a remarkable sleuth who … shows us how the deck is stacked, how the game is played, who gains, and who loses. Join him in a clarion call to build a Movement to reclaim public education.” —Robert P. Moses, The Algebra Project “Courageous, blunt, and hopeful, Bad Teacher! offers a democratic vision for true educational change.” —Sonia Nieto, University of Massachusetts at Amherst “Anyone seeking to understand why so many of the reforms we have pursued have failed will benefit from reading this book.” —Pedro A. Noguera, New York University “Kumashiro explains why we should think differently about the prescriptions that are now taken for granted—and wrong.” —Diane Ravitch, New York University, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education “Kumashiro expertly examines the many forces working against public education, and how and why these forces are at play.” —Dennis Van Roekel, President, National Education Association “Bad Teacher! is oh-so-smart and timely. . . . This book attacks head-on the ragged patchwork of ‘school reform’ that has left us without even the vocabulary to frame what’s gone wrong.” —Patricia J. Williams, Columbia Law School 2012 Must-read book about K–12 education in the U.S., Christian Science Monitor

Argues that scapegoating public school teachers and unions masks the real problems within the eduction system in the United States, and suggests ways to reframe the debate to create better solutions for public education reform.

This book presents teaching as evolution, teaching as autobiography, teaching as love, and asks the question: What keeps teachers going in spite of everything?

Explores the pressures on today's teachers and examines how the public school system--driven by statistics and finances--undermines its educators, while offering suggestions on how lasting school reform can be achieved.

José Vilson writes about race, class, and education through stories from the classroom and researched essays. His rise from rookie math teacher to prominent teacher leader takes a twist when he takes on education reform through his now-blocked eponymous blog, TheJoseVilson.com. He calls for the reclaiming of the education profession while seeking social justice. José Vilson is a middle school math educator for in the Inwood/Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. He writes for Edutopia, GOOD, and TransformED / Future of Teaching, and his work has appeared in Education Week, CNN.com, Huffington Post, and El Diario / La Prensa.

Frustrated by the challenge of opening teacher education students to a genuine understanding of the social justice concepts vital for creating an equitable learning environment?Do your students ever resist accepting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer people experience bias or oppression, or that their experiences even belong in a conversation about “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “social justice?”Recognizing these are common experiences for teacher educators, the contributors to this book present their struggles and achievements in developing approaches that have successfully guided students to complex understandings of such threshold concepts as White privilege, homophobia, and heteronormativity, overcoming the “bottlenecks” that impede progress toward bigger learning goals and understandings. The authors initiate a conversation – one largely absent in the social justice education literature and the discourse – about the common content- and pedagogy-related challenges that social justice educators face in their work, particularly for those doing this work in relative or literal isolation, where collegial understanding cannot be found down the hall or around the corner. In doing so they hope not only to help individual teachers in their practice, but also strengthen social justice teacher education more systemically. Each contributor identifies a learning bottleneck related to one or two specific threshold concepts that they have struggled to help their students learn. Each chapter is a narrative about individual efforts toward sometimes profound pedagogical adjustment, about ambiguity and cognitive dissonance and resistance, about trial and error, and about how these educators found ways to facilitate foundational social justice learning among a diversity of education students. Although this is not intended to be a “how-to” manual, or to provide five easy steps to enable straight students to “get” heteronormativity, each chapter does describe practical strategies that teachers might adapt as part of their own practice.

An examination of how curriculum choices can perpetuate White supremacy, and radical strategies for how schools and teacher education programs can disrupt and transform racism in education When racist curriculum “goes viral” on social media, it is typically dismissed as an isolated incident from a “bad” teacher. Educator Bree Picower, however, holds that racist curriculum isn’t an anomaly. It’s a systemic problem that reflects how Whiteness is embedded and reproduced in education. In Reading, Writing, and Racism, Picower argues that White teachers must reframe their understanding about race in order to advance racial justice and that this must begin in teacher education programs. Drawing on her experience teaching and developing a program that prepares teachers to focus on social justice and antiracism, Picower demonstrates how teachers’ ideology of race, consciously or unconsciously, shapes how they teach race in the classroom. She also examines current examples of racist curricula that have gone viral to demonstrate how Whiteness is entrenched in schools and how this reinforces racial hierarchies in the younger generation. With a focus on institutional strategies, Picower shows how racial justice can be built into programs across the teacher education pipeline—from admission to induction. By examining the who, what, why, and how of racial justice teacher education, she provides radical possibilities for transforming how teachers think about, and teach about, race in their classrooms.