This book profiles local and national efforts to transform urban education and reinvent urban teacher preparation. It describes real programs in real urban schools that have developed policy initiatives that promote educational equity, community-based curricula, and teacher education and parent empowerment programs that emphasize democratic collaboration among universities, urban teachers, parents, and community members. By involving all stakeholders, this comprehensive approach provides a model for creating urban schools that not only excite and inspire, but also serve as engines for social change. Contending that urban education reform will fail without public engagement and a commitment to social justice, the contributors challenge urban educators to become accountable to their students and the communities they serve.

A comprehensive update of the classic study that delivers both a passionate plea and strategies for teachers, parents, and community organizers to give working-class children the same type of empowering education and powerful literacy skills that the children of upper- and middle-class people receive.

The classic, indispensable guide for teachers, parents, and community organizers concerned with educating working-class children, Literacy with an Attitude dares to define literacy as a powerful right of citizenship. Patrick J. Finn persuasively debunks the time-honored paradigm for teaching poor and working-class students. Our job, he argues, is not to help such students to become middle class and live middle-class lives—most don’t want it. Education rather should focus on a powerful literacy—a literacy with an attitude—that enables working-class and poor students to better understand, demand, and protect their civil, political, and social rights. This tenth-anniversary, second edition features eight new chapters and a revised and updated original text.

Veteran educator and best-selling author Baruti Kafele offers strategies for motivating students from diverse backgrounds to become passionate about learning.

This text offers a scholarly, in-depth analysis of urban education that provides insights into its current failures while suggesting policies and practices to make it more effective in the future. Payne . . . questions conventional attitudes and approaches to urban education. . . . This well-written text contains extensive footnotes, references, and an index. It compares favorably with quality studies concerned with the problems confronting urban education. Highly recommended for the general public and students at the community college and lower- and upper-division undergraduate levels. Choice Payne's review of the literature is thoroughly documented, his research painstakingly carried out, and his theories are stated lucidly. An important book for those involved with the struggle for educational equality. Library Journal

This second edition of the Handbook of Urban Education offers a fresh, fluid, and diverse range of perspectives from which the authors describe, analyze, and offer recommendations for urban education in the US. Each of the seven sections includes an introduction, providing an overview and contextualization of the contents. In addition, there are discussion questions at the conclusion of many of the 31 chapters. The seven sections in this edition of the Handbook include: (1) Multidisciplinary Perspectives (e.g., economics, health sciences, sociology, and human development); (2) Policy and Leadership; (3) Teacher Education and Teaching; (4) Curriculum, Language, and Literacy; (5) STEM; (6) Parents, Families, and Communities; and (7) School Closures, Gentrification, and Youth Voice and Innovations. Chapters are written by leaders in the field of urban education, and there are 27 new authors in this edition of the Handbook. The book covers a wide and deep range of the landscape of urban education. It is a powerful and accessible introduction to the field of urban education for researchers, theorists, policymakers and practitioners as well as a critical call for the future of the field for those more seasoned in the field.

Using a social justice approach to teacher education, the contributing teacher educators address the need to prepare teachers to understand the way social class, race, and culture impact their efforts to educate working-class students. By helping prepare teachers to strengthen democracy through education, the contributors offer ways to help them develop "critical consciousness"—the will to address society's injustices and inequities. Teachers who collaborate actively with their students, their families, and others, such as community and labor organizers, to challenge the economic and educational policies that keep the hierarchical structure in place, develop their own educational and political power alongside their students. These educators see schools as sites of struggle for democracy, and their students learn to direct their attitude toward outcomes that are in their collective self-interest.