Americas Schools

Like thousands of Aboriginal children in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars spent part of her childhood as a student in a church-run residential school. These institutions endeavored to "civilize" Native children through Christian teachings; forced separation from family, language, and culture; and strict discipline. In this frank and poignant memoir of her years at St. Joseph's Mission, Sellars breaks her silence about the residential school's lasting effects on her and her family and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.

This is a knock-your-socks-off groundbreaking treatise that is of interest to every thinking adult, and certainly every thinking educator. The author has spent the last 50 years working to establish the most innovative school in the world. His background includes a PhD and work as a professor of history of science.

This true story took place at the emergency farm-labor camp immortalized in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Ostracized as "dumb Okies," the children of Dust Bowl migrant laborers went without school—until Superintendent Leo Hart and 50 Okie kids built their own school in a nearby field.

The Roman Catholic Church is in a major crisis. At the core of this crisis is male supremacy—men who dominate the church and view themselves as superior to women. An all-loving God created everyone of equal worth and dignity. There are no exceptions! This memoir, written by a Catholic priest for forty years, addresses the injustice of male supremacy, sexism and the spiritual abuse of women in the Catholic Church. Author Roy Bourgeois grew up in a small town in Louisiana. After graduating from college, he spent four years in the military and received the Purple Heart in Vietnam. Leaving ...

With its practical advice and compassionate tone, The Myth of Laziness shows parents how to nurture their child's strengths and improve their classroom productivity. Most important, it shows how correcting these problems in childhood will help children live a fulfilling and productive adult life.

Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 Americans have viewed school integration as a central tenet of the Black civil rights movement. Yet, school integration was not the only - or even always the dominant - civil rights strategy. At times, African Americans also fought for separate, Black-controlled schools dedicated to racial uplift and community empowerment.

The Parkland school shooting was the most avoidable mass murder in American history. And the policies that made it inevitable have spread to your school....

In the first half of the 20th century, Dunbar was an academically elite public school, despite being racially segregated by law. By the 1950s, Dunbar High School was sending 80 percent of its students to college. Today, as with too many troubled urban public schools, the majority of Dunbar students struggle with reading and math. Journalist and author Alison Stewart, whose parents were both Dunbar graduates, tells the story of the school’s rise, fall, and path toward resurgence.

The Big Lie About Race in America's Schools delivers a collective response to the challenge of racially charged misinformation, disinformation, and censorship that increasingly permeates and weakens not only US education but also our democracy. Royel Johnson and Shaun Harper bring together leading education scholars and educators to confront the weaponized distortions that are undermining both public education and racial justice. The experts gathered in this work offer strategies to counter these dangerous trends.

At a time when Americans are debating the future of public education, Johann N. Neem tells the inspiring story of how and why Americans built a robust public school system in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. It’s a story in which ordinary people in towns across the country worked together to form districts and build schoolhouses and reformers sought to expand tax support and give every child a liberal education. By the time of the Civil War, most northern states had made common schools free, and many southern states were heading in the same direction.

When the Bell Tolls: The Fires that Changed America The Fires that Changed America' chronicles the stories of the Sultana Tragedy, Station Nightclub Fire, Richmond Theatre Fire, Ohio State Penitentiary Fire, Collinwood School Fire, Cocoanut Grove Fire, Iroquois Theater Fire, St. Luke's Sanitarium Fire, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Each page of this book resounds with the echoes of history, engulfed in flames and sorrow, while exploring the enduring human capacity for resilience and change. Unearth the overlooked details of the Sultana Tragedy, a maritime disaster that took a ...

Journalist Jo Napolitano delves into the landmark case in which the School District of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was sued for refusing to admit older, non-English speaking refugees and sending them to a high-discipline alternative school. In a legal battle that mirrors that of the Little Rock Nine and Brown v. Board of Education, 6 brave refugee students fought alongside the ACLU and Education Law Center to demand equal access.

One of Argentina's 30,000 "disappeared", Alicia Partnoy was abducted from her home by secret police and taken to a concentration camp where she was tortured, and where most of the other prisoners were killed. Her writings were smuggled out of prison and published anonymously in human rights journals. The Little School is Alicia Partnoy's memoir of her disappearance and imprisonment in Argentina in the 1970s.

Jaime is sitting on his bed drawing when he hears a scream. Instantly, he knows: Miguel, his cousin and best friend, is dead. Everyone in Jaime's small town in Guatemala knows someone who has been killed by the Alphas, a powerful gang that's known for violence and drug trafficking. Anyone who refuses to work for them is hurt or killed - like Miguel. With Miguel gone, Jaime fears that he is next. There's only one choice: accompanied by his cousin Ángela, Jaime must flee his home to live with his older brother in New Mexico.

In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America’s schools.

Different minds learn differently. We must pay attention to individual learning patterns, to individual minds so that we can maximize children's performance in school and in life. In A Mind at a Time, Dr. Levine shows us how.

Listen as Dee Brown weaves humorous, richly detailed stories of his early years as a youthful entrepreneur and teenaged newspaperman.

Born in the picturesque town of Taxco, Mexico, Julissa Arce was left behind for months at a time with her two sisters, a nanny, and her grandma while her parents worked tirelessly in America in hopes of building a home and providing a better life for their children. That is, until her parents brought Julissa to Texas to live with them. From then on, Julissa secretly lived as an undocumented immigrant, went on to become a scholarship winner and an honors college graduate, and climbed the ladder to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs.

In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools. In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools.

Many seek leadership rooted in Christian values to help navigate the challenges of modern life. Faith Fading takes you on a compelling journey through this pivotal transformation, examining how and why this change is occurring; while exploring ways faith can continue to guide us through these uncertain times.