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In her new book, bestselling author Mercedes Schneider provides little-known details about the history of the Common Core State Standards. She lifts the veil on how the Common Core was developed, who was present in the back room, the push to copyright it so that test-makers could profit, and the urgency for governors to sign commitments before the standards were even completed. CCSS is publicized as being a state-led, teacher-developed approach guaranteed to ensure that all students are college- and career-ready. By the end of this eye-opening book, readers will come to understand the CCSS and its attendant assessments as something very different—an education-restricting, profit-garnering opportunity packaged as an education-sounding sales pitch. Common Core Dilemma will appeal to readers across the political spectrum who want to better understand the role of corporations, nonprofits, big donors with strings attached, and the federal government in exercising control in our schools. “Mercedes Schneider is the right person to take a close look at the controversies around the Common Core. She is not only a high school teacher, but also holds a Ph.D. in research methods and statistics. No one digs deeper than she to understand the politics, money, and personalities behind big issues.” —Diane Ravitch, professor of education at New York University, historian of education and bestselling author, author of Reign of Error “The Common Core 'state' standards swept the nation in an educational coup d’etat six years ago. The campaign was so swift that most Americans—indeed most educators—had never even heard of the standards when they were adopted. Mercedes Schneider has become the nation's leading detective investigating this 'whodunnit' mystery, and here she tells the tale, from the beginning.” —Anthony Cody, educator, writer, and public speaker

How the Common Core standardizes our kids’ education—and how it threatens our democracy. The Common Core State Standards Initiative is one of the most controversial pieces of education policy to emerge in decades. Detailing what and when K–12 students should be taught, it has led to expensive reforms and displaced other valuable ways to educate children. In this nuanced and provocative book, Nicholas Tampio argues that, though national standards can raise the education bar for some students, the democratic costs outweigh the benefits. To make his case, Tampio describes the history, philosophy, content, and controversy surrounding the Common Core standards for English language arts and math. He also explains and critiques the Next Generation Science Standards, the Advanced Placement US History curriculum framework, and the National Sexuality Education Standards. Though each set of standards has admirable elements, Tampio asserts that democracies should disperse education authority rather than entrust one political or pedagogical faction to decide the country’s entire philosophy of education. Ultimately, this lively and accessible book presents a compelling case that the greater threat to democratic education comes from centralized government control rather than from local education authorities.

In the wake of the tragedy and destruction that came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, public schools in New Orleans became part of an almost unthinkable experiment—eliminating the traditional public education system and completely replacing it with charter schools and school choice. Fifteen years later, the results have been remarkable, and the complex lessons learned should alter the way we think about American education. New Orleans became the first US city ever to adopt a school system based on the principles of markets and economics. When the state took over all of the city’s public schools, it turned them over to non-profit charter school managers accountable under performance-based contracts. Students were no longer obligated to attend a specific school based upon their address, allowing families to act like consumers and choose schools in any neighborhood. The teacher union contract, tenure, and certification rules were eliminated, giving schools autonomy and control to hire and fire as they pleased. In Charter School City, Douglas N. Harris provides an inside look at how and why these reform decisions were made and offers many surprising findings from one of the most extensive and rigorous evaluations of a district school reform ever conducted. Through close examination of the results, Harris finds that this unprecedented experiment was a noteworthy success on almost every measurable student outcome. But, as Harris shows, New Orleans was uniquely situated for these reforms to work well and that this market-based reform still required some specific and active roles for government. Letting free markets rule on their own without government involvement will not generate the kinds of changes their advocates suggest. Combining the evidence from New Orleans with that from other cities, Harris draws out the broader lessons of this unprecedented reform effort. At a time when charter school debates are more based on ideology than data, this book is a powerful, evidence-based, and in-depth look at how we can rethink the roles for governments, markets, and nonprofit organizations in education to ensure that America’s schools fulfill their potential for all students.

The purpose of this text is to elicit discussion, reflection, and action specific to pedagogy within education, especially higher education, and circles of experiential learning, community organizing, conflict resolution and youth empowerment work. Vulnerability itself is not a new term within education; however the pedagogical imperatives of vulnerability are both undertheorized in educational discourse and underexplored in practice. This work builds on that of Edward Brantmeier in Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Pathways to Wisdom and Transformation (Lin, Oxford, & Brantmeier, 2013). In his chapter, “Pedagogy of vulnerability: Definitions, assumptions, and application,” he outlines a set of assumptions about the term, clarifying for his readers the complicated, risky, reciprocal, and purposeful nature of vulnerability, particularly within educational settings. Creating spaces of risk taking, and consistent mutual, critical engagement are challenging at a moment in history where neoliberal forces impact so many realms of formal teaching and learning. Within this context, the divide between what educators, be they in a classroom or a community, imagine as possible and their ability to implement these kinds of pedagogical possibilities is an urgent conundrum worth exploring. We must consider how to address these disconnects; advocating and envisioning a more holistic, healthy, forward thinking model of teaching and learning. How do we create cultures of engaged inquiry, framed in vulnerability, where educators and students are compelled to ask questions just beyond their grasp? How can we all be better equipped to ask and answer big, beautiful, bold, even uncomfortable questions that fuel the heart of inquiry and perhaps, just maybe, lead to a more peaceful and just world? A collection of reflections, case studies, and research focused on the pedagogy of vulnerability is a starting point for this work. The book itself is meant to be an example of pedagogical vulnerability, wherein the authors work to explicate the most intimate and delicate aspects of the varied pedagogical journeys, understandings rooted in vulnerability, and those of their students, colleagues, clients, even adversaries. It is a work that “holds space.”

This book provides a critical analysis of the neoliberal reform agenda of the economic governance of schools. Focusing on the role of the United States in this process, it explores the transformation of schools in this agenda from educational establishments to enterprises in a competitive education market. The study uses Bourdieu to apply a field-theoretical framework to a detailed empirical analysis of the current changes of school government. Chapters explore education bureaucracy, reform and the effect of outside organizations on pedagogy and testing. The book reveals how far the promises of corporate education reform are from reality and concludes with a plea for a realistic view of school’s capabilities. It goes beyond the state of the art with its focus on how the governance of education, school and instruction is changing with the replacement of educracy by an education-industrial complex. The book will be of great interest for academics, postgraduate students, administrators and politicians in the field of education policy, the governance of school systems and schools. The book also has an international appeal as it studies a global transformation of the field of education.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. For the Internet and digitial generation, the most basic human right is the freedom to read. The Web has indeed brought about a rapid and far-reaching revolution in reading, making a limitless global pool of literature and information available to anyone with a computer. At the same time, however, the threats of censorship, surveillance, and mass manipulation through the media have grown apace. Some of the most important political battles of the twenty-first century have been fought—and will be fought—over the right to read. Will it be adequately protected by constitutional guarantees and freedom of information laws? Or will it be restricted by very wealthy individuals and very powerful institutions? And given increasingly sophisticated methods of publicity and propaganda, how much of what we read can we believe? This book surveys the history of independent sceptical reading, from antiquity to the present. It tells the stories of heroic efforts at self-education by disadvantaged people in all parts of the world. It analyzes successful reading promotion campaigns throughout history (concluding with Oprah Winfrey) and explains why they succeeded. It also explores some disturbing current trends, such as the reported decay of attentive reading, the disappearance of investigative journalism, 'fake news', the growth of censorship, and the pervasive influence of advertisers and publicists on the media—even on scientific publishing. For anyone who uses libraries and Internet to find out what the hell is going on, this book is a guide, an inspiration, and a warning.