In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Just Schools examines the challenges and possibilities for building more equitable forms of collaboration among non-dominant families, communities, and schools. The text explores how equitable collaboration entails ongoing processes that begin with families and communities, transform power, build reciprocity and agency, and foster collective capacity through collective inquiry. These processes offer promising possibilities for improving student learning, transforming educational systems, and developing robust partnerships that build on the resources, expertise, and cultural practices of non-dominant families. Based on empirical research and inquiry-driven practice, this book describes core concepts and provides multiple examples of effective practices. “This is the most compelling work to date on school and community engagement. It will be required reading for all my future classes.” —Muhammad Khalifa, University of Minnesota “Full of practical steps that educators and administrators can and must take to build strong collaborations with families.” —Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts Boston “This important publication provides a way forward for educators, families, students and community members to co-create “Just Schools” by honoring, validating, and celebrating each other’s knowledge, skills, power and resources.” —Karen Mapp, Harvard Graduate School of Education

We live in a world of one-size-fits-all law. People are different, but the laws that govern them are uniform. "Personalized Law"---rules that vary person by person---will change that. Here is a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally-tailored law. "Reasonable person" standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own "reasonable you" rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care, the most vulnerable consumers and employees would receive stronger protections, age restrictions for driving or for the consumption of alcohol would vary according the recklessness risk that each person poses, and borrowers would be entitled to personalized loan disclosures tailored to their unique needs and delivered in a format fitting their mental capacity. The data and algorithms to administer personalize law are at our doorstep, and embryos of this regime are sprouting. Should we welcome this transformation of the law? Does personalized law harbor a utopic promise, or would it produce alienation, demoralization, and discrimination? This book is the first to explore personalized law, offering a vision of law and robotics that delegates to machines those tasks humans are least able to perform well. It inquires how personalized law can be designed to deliver precision and justice and what pitfalls the regime would have to prudently avoid. In this book, Omri Ben-Shahar and Ariel Porat not only present this concept in a clear, easily accessible way, but they offer specific examples of how personalized law may be implemented across a variety of real-life applications.

"Sergiovanni documents cases of schools that have successfully reinvented themselves in order to establish a sense of 'community' as the foundation for all curriculum and instruction decisions. . . . Teachers, administrators, teacher educators, and communities seeking advice and motivation for restructuring schools for the 21st century would be well advised to consult this work." --Choice "Provides the practitioner with both a theoretical blueprint with which to build learning communities and a rich supply of benchmark illustrations to use as prototypes. . . . thought-provoking and challenging." --NASSP Bulletin Both in and out of schools, people are experiencing a loss of community. In this book, Thomas J. Sergiovanni explains why a sense of community is so vital to the success of any school and shows teachers, parents, and administrators what they can do to rebuild it. Filled with case studies and other school examples, Building Community in Schools provides the necessary intellectual framework for understanding the need to create communities that are inclusive, meaningful, and democratic.

Providing new insight into an important community development challenge, this text looks at how to stimulate the formation of community-based organizations and effective citizen action in neighbourhoods.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014! How can teachers transform classroom teaching and learning by making pedagogy more socially and culturally responsive, more relevant to students’ lives, and more collaborative? How can they engage disaffected students in learning and at the same time promote deep understanding though high-quality teaching that goes beyond test preparation? This text for prospective and practicing teachers introduces engaging, innovative pedagogy for putting active and dramatic approaches to learning and teaching into action. Written in an accessible, conversational, and refreshingly honest style by a teacher and professor with over 30 years' experience, it features real examples of preschool, elementary, middle, and high school teachers working in actual classrooms in diverse settings. Their tales explore not only how, but also why, they have changed the way they teach. Photographs and stories of their classroom practice, along with summarizing charts of principles and strategies, both illuminate the critical, cross-curricular, and inquiry-based conceptual framework Edmiston develops and provide rich examples and straightforward guidelines that can support readers as they experiment with using active and dramatic approaches to dialogue, inquiry, building community, planning for exploration, and authentic assessment in their own classrooms.

When she began work on this collection, Barbara Ellen Smith was asked, "Why work on a book about women in the South? Nobody writes books about women in the Midwest." In an era of intensified globalization, when populations, cultures, and capital move across the boundaries of nation-states in multiple forms and directions, the concept of a subnational region seems parochial and out of date. "But," Smith argues, "it is precisely because of the historical construction of the secessionist South as an embattled region when all manners of social problems tend to be blamed on poor women and children and those whose skin is anything but white, that the experiences of racially diverse women in a region legendary for both white supremacy and male supremacy are important to explore." Collecting in one volume the work of such well-known scholars on Appalachia and the South as Carl Stack, Mab Segrest, and Sally Maggard, among others, Neither Separate Nor Equal analyzes the complex and dramatic developments in the lives of contemporary Southern women. Case studies vividly portray women's diverse circumstances activities: from rural African American women in the Mississippi Delta taking on new roles as community builders to female textile workers in North Carolina contending with automation and reorganization of the mills. Focusing on the South's historical legacies as they are manifested and contested in the lives of women today, including the tensions between long-lasting patterns of regional distinctiveness and the disruptions of globalizations, this collection approaches differences of race and class not as forms of separation among women, but as social -- be they often contentious, difficult, or exploitive -- relationships. Unifying around a theme of relationally, Neither Separate Nor Equal offers searching empirical studies of Southern women and a conceptual model for feminist scholarship as a whole.