Friday Night Lights meets Concussion in this powerful and important novel by Geoff Herbach, author of the Stupid Fast series, exploring the dangerous concussion crisis in football through the eyes of a high school team captain. Isaiah loves football. In fact, football saved Isaiah’s life, giving him structure and discipline after his sister’s death tore his family apart. But when Isaiah gets knocked out cold on the field, he learns there’s a lot more to lose than football. While recovering from a concussion, Isaiah wonders what his life would look like without the game. All his friends are on the team, and Isaiah knows they can’t win without him. The scholarship offer from Cornell is only on the table if he keeps playing. And without football, what would keep his family together? What would prevent him from sliding back into the habits that nearly destroyed him? Isaiah must decide how much he’s willing to sacrifice for the sport that gave him everything, even if playing football threatens to take away his future.

A Brookings Institution Press and Russell Sage Foundation publication Education is one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy--yet scholars, educators, policymakers, and parents do not agree about what the money spent on education really buys. In particular, they do not agree on how much education improves children's ability to learn or whether the things children learn in school truly improve their chances for success as adults. If schooling increases how much students know and what they know does pay off later, then it is important to ask what schools can do to increase students' learning and earning. The essays in this book report estimates of the effects of learning on earnings and other life outcomes. They also examine whether particular aspects of schooling--such as the age at which children begin school, classroom size, and curriculum--or structural reform--such as national or statewide examinations or school choice--affect learning. Taken together, their findings suggest that liberals are correct in saying that more investment is needed in early education, that class sizes should be further reduced, and that challenging national or state standards should be established. But they also provide support for conservatives who ask for a more demanding curriculum and greater school choice. Contributors include John Bishop, Eric Hanushek, James Heckman, Christopher Jencks, Caroline Minter Hoxby, Fred Mosteller, and Christopher Winship.

In this groundbreaking book, Tristram Riley-Smith charts the cultural landscape of a conflicted America in the opening decade of the 21st Century and addresses two key questions: Why is it that a nation that is so clear about its destiny leaves the world confused about its direction of travel; and why is it that a people intent on the pursuit of happiness appears so unsettled? Delving beneath the chaotic surface of American society, Riley-Smith exposes the enduring fault-lines in the cultural bedrock. In doing so, he offers up a panoramic snapshot of American society, flash-lit by the thunderbolts of '9/11', Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 Credit Crash and the inauguration of President Obama. The Cracked Bell gets to the heart of what it means to live in Obama's America, addressing questions of identity and power, belief and value, liberty and law, innovation and tradition, commerce and consumption, nature and civilization, war and peace.

The campaign to unionize Bell Canada’s huge workforce of operators, most of them overworked and underpaid women, was a central event in Canada’s labour history. Joan Roberts tells the story of how determined campaigners won a major victory for working women, and established new standards for so-called “pink collar” jobs of the day.