ThisNew York Times bestseller chronicles how Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Christie, and Cory Booker tried—and failed—to reform education in Newark, NJ. In September of 2010, billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went on Oprah to announce a pledge of $100 million to transform the downtrodden schools of Newark, New Jersey. There by his side were the city’s Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, and the state’s Republican governor, Chris Christie. Together, they vowed to make Newark “a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” But this trio of power players had no idea what they were in for. The tumultuous changes planned by reformers and their highly paid consultants spark a fiery grass-roots opposition stoked by local politicians and union leaders. At the center of the fight was Newark’s billion-dollar-a-year education budget: a prize that, for generations, had enriched seemingly everyone, except Newark’s children. In The Prize, Dale Russakoff presents a dramatic narrative encompassing the rise of celebrity politics, big philanthropy, extreme economic inequality, the charter school movement, and the struggles and triumphs of schools in one of the nation’s poorest cities. “One of the most important books on education to come along in years.”—The New York Times

Black Power at Work chronicles the history of direct action campaigns to open up the construction industry to black workers in the 1960s and 1970s. The book's case studies of local movements in Brooklyn, Newark, the Bay Area, Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle show how struggles against racism in the construction industry shaped the emergence of Black Power politics outside the U.S. South. In the process, "community control" of the construction industry—especially government War on Poverty and post-rebellion urban reconstruction projects— became central to community organizing for black economic self-determination and political autonomy. The history of Black Power's community organizing tradition shines a light on more recent debates about job training and placement for unemployed, underemployed, and underrepresented workers. Politicians responded to Black Power protests at federal construction projects by creating modern affirmative action and minority set-aside programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but these programs relied on "voluntary" compliance by contractors and unions, government enforcement was inadequate, and they were not connected to jobs programs. Forty years later, the struggle to have construction jobs serve as a pathway out of poverty for inner city residents remains an unfinished part of the struggle for racial justice and labor union reform in the United States.

In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream. Material goods came to embody the promise of America, and the power of consumers to purchase everything from vacuum cleaners to convertibles gave rise to the power of citizens to purchase political influence and effect social change. Yet despite undeniable successes and unprecedented affluence, mass consumption also fostered economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. In charting the complex legacy of our “Consumers’ Republic” Lizabeth Cohen has written a bold, encompassing, and profoundly influential book.

First Published in 1996. Some people believe that if inner-city black children had excellent schools, they would perform better in them. Granted, schools are a part of the problem, but they are not all of the solution. Schools are only buildings where teachers, administrators, and students interact. Learning is a more much complex process. There are many forces arrayed against an inner-city child that preclude him/her from mastering the education process. Among these forces are poverty, family instability, disruptive classroom environments, and incompetent teachers. There seems to be no end to research and speculation about how to overcome these forces. However, the author asserts that the gap between black and white children continues to widen. With research beginning in 1989, exploring three school systems for this study: Detroit, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; and Newark, New Jersey. The book presents a systematic survey of school politics in these three cities, giving particular emphasis to local reform efforts.