A companion to City Kids, City Teachers is a collection of top-selected writings on life in urban schools and neighborhoods, in a volume that explores such topics as culturally relevant teaching methods, the criminalization of youth, and the inequities of school funding. Original.

“City Kids, City Teachers has the potential to create genuine change in the learning, teaching, and administration of urban public schools.” —Library Journal In more than twenty-five provocative selections, an all-star cast of educators and writers explores the surprising realities of city classrooms from kindergarten through high school. Contributors including Gloria Ladson-Billings, Lisa Delpit, June Jordan, Lewis H. Lapham, Audre Lorde, and Deborah Meier move from the poetic to the practical, celebrating the value of city kids and their teachers. Useful both as a guide and a call to action for anyone who teaches or has taught in the city, it is essential reading for those contemplating teaching in an urban setting and for every parent with children in a city school today. “Hopeful, helpful discussions of culturally relevant teaching . . . moving illustrations of what urban teaching is all about.” —Publishers Weekly “A refreshing and eclectic collection.” —Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “With its upbeat mix of ready-to-share city kids’ memoirs and classroom strategies, this book is an inspiring resource for veteran teachers, parents, community members, and students.” —Educational Leadership “You’ll feel sad, angry, hopeful, agitated, and inspired.” —NEA Today

Of the approximately 50 million public school students in the United States, more than half are in urban schools. A contemporary companion to City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, this new and timely collection has been compiled by four of the country's most prominent urban educators. Contributors including Sandra Cisneros, Jonathan Kozol, Sapphire, and Patricia J. Williams provide some of the best writing on life in city schools and neighborhoods. Young people and practicing teachers, poets and scholars, social critics and journalists offer unique takes on topics ranging from culturally relevant teaching and scripted curricula to the criminalization of youth, gentrification, and the inequities of school funding. In the words of Sonia Nieto, City Kids, City Schools “challenge[s] the conventional wisdom of what it means to teach in urban schools.”

Textbook

Thanks to the success of franchises such as The Hunger Games and Twilight, young adult literature has reached a new level of prominence and popularity. Teens and adults alike are drawn to the genre's coming-of-age themes, fast pacing, and vivid emotional portrayals. The essays in this volume suggest ways high school and college instructors can incorporate YA texts into courses in literature, education, library science, and general education. The first group of essays explores key issues in YA literature, situates works in cultural contexts, and addresses questions of text selection and censorship. The second section discusses a range of genres within YA literature, including both realistic and speculative fiction as well as verse narratives, comics, and film. The final section offers ideas for assignments, including interdisciplinary and digital projects, in a variety of courses.

What do Whoopi Goldberg, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Rosie Perez, and Phylicia Rashad have in common? A transformative encounter with the arts during their school years. Whether attending a play for the first time, playing in the school orchestra, painting a mural under the direction of an art teacher, or writing a poem, these famous performers each credit an experience with the arts at school with helping them discover their inner humanity and putting them on the road to fully realized creative lives. In The Muses Go to School, autobiographical pieces with well-known artists and performers are paired with interpretive essays by distinguished educators to produce a powerful case for positioning the arts at the center of primary and secondary school curriculums. Spanning a range of genres from acting and music to literary and visual arts, these smart and entertaining voices make surprising connections between the arts and the development of intellect, imagination, spirit, emotional intelligence, self-esteem, and self-discipline of young people. With support from a star-studded cast, editors Herbert Kohl and Tom Oppenheim present a memorable critique of the growing national trend to eliminate the arts in public education. Going well beyond the traditional rationales, The Muses Go to School shows that creative arts, as a means of academic and personal development, are a critical element of any education. It is essential reading for teachers, parents, and anyone who really cares about education.

From the MacArthur Award–winning education reformer and author of the bestselling Other People's Children, a long-awaited new book on how to fix the persistent black/white achievement gap in America's public schools As MacArthur Award–winning educator Lisa Delpit reminds us—and as all research shows—there is no achievement gap at birth. In her long-awaited second book, Delpit presents a striking picture of the elements of contemporary public education that conspire against the prospects for poor children of color, creating a persistent gap in achievement during the school years that has eluded several decades of reform. Delpit's bestselling and paradigm-shifting first book, Other People's Children, focused on cultural slippage in the classroom between white teachers and students of color. Now, in "Multiplication Is for White People", Delpit reflects on two decades of reform efforts—including No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, the creation of alternative teacher certification paths, and the charter school movement—that have still left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement isn't for them. In chapters covering primary, middle, and high school, as well as college, Delpit concludes that it's not that difficult to explain the persistence of the achievement gap. In her wonderful trademark style, punctuated with telling classroom anecdotes and informed by time spent at dozens of schools across the country, Delpit outlines an inspiring and uplifting blueprint for raising expectations for other people's children, based on the simple premise that multiplication—and every aspect of advanced education—is for everyone.