Social Reform

Despite the progress of decades-old disability rights policy, including the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, threats continue to undermine the well-being of this population. The U.S. is, thus, a policy innovator and laggard in this regard. In Politics of Empowerment, David Pettinicchio offers a historically grounded analysis of the singular case of U.S. disability policy, countering long-held views of progress that privilege public demand as its primary driver.

Exploring the full sweep of federalism from the founding to today, Kettl focuses on pivotal moments when power has shifted between state and national governments - from the violent rebalancing of the Civil War, when the nation almost split in two, to the era of civil rights a century later, when there was apparent agreement that inequality was a threat to liberty and the federal government should set policies for states to enact. Despite this consensus, inequality between states has only deepened since that moment.

Education policy sentinel Frederick M. Hess offers a pithy and perceptive appraisal of American schooling and finds, in the uncertain period following pandemic disruption, an ideal moment to reimagine US education. Now is the time, he asserts, to ask hard questions about how schools use time and talent, how they work with parents, what they do with digital tools, and how they meet the needs of their communities.

In “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It,” president emeritus of Macalester College Brian Rosenberg draws on decades of higher education experience to expose the entrenched structures, practices, and cultures that inhibit meaningful postsecondary reform, even as institutions face serious challenges to their financial and educational models. A lively insider’s account, the book pinpoints factors that hinder the ability of U.S. colleges and universities to be creative and entrepreneurial amid calls to improve affordability, access, and equity for students.

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.

What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young Black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays explores police violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures.

In These Schools Belong to You and Me, MacArthur Award-winning educator, reformer, and author Deborah Meier draws on her 50-plus years of experience to argue that the purpose of universal education is to provide young people with an "apprenticeship for citizenship in a democracy". Through an intergenerational exchange with her former colleague and fellow educator Emily Gasoi, the coauthors analyze the last several decades of education reform, challenging narrow profit-driven conceptions of school success.

An insider’s account of the infamous Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal that scapegoated black employees for problems caused by an education reform movement that is increasingly a proxy for corporate greed.

Saving Schools traces the story of the rise, decline, and potential resurrection of American public schools through the lives and ideas of six mission-driven reformers: Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Shanker, William Bennett, and James Coleman. Yet schools did not become the efficient, egalitarian, and high-quality educational institutions these reformers envisioned. Indeed, the unintended consequences of their legacies shaped today's flawed educational system.

In Earth in Mind, David W. Orr argues that much of what has gone wrong with the world, is the result of inadequate and misdirected education that: Alienates us from life in the name of human domination; causes students to worry about how to make a living before they know who they are; overemphasizes success and careers; separates feeling from intellect and the practical from the theoretical; deadens the sense of wonder for the created world.

We’ve all had great teachers who opened new worlds, maybe even changed our lives. What made them so great? Everyone agrees that a great teacher can have an enormous impact. Yet we still don't know what, precisely, makes a teacher great. Is it a matter of natural-born charisma? Or does exceptional teaching require something more? Building a Better Teacher introduces a new generation of educators exploring the intricate science underlying their art.

Like all of us, though few so visibly, Alan Greenspan was forced by the financial crisis of 2008 to question some fundamental assumptions about risk management and economic forecasting. No one with any meaningful role in economic decision making in the world saw beforehand the storm for what it was. How had our models so utterly failed us? To answer this question, Alan Greenspan embarked on a rigorous and far-reaching multiyear examination of how Homo economicus predicts the economic future, and how it can predict it better.

Blended learning has the power to reinvent education, but the transition requires a new approach to learning and a new skillset for educators. Loaded with research and examples, Blended Learning in Action demonstrates the advantages a blended model has over traditional instruction when technology is used to engage students both inside the classroom and online.

This definitive people’s history of the recovery movement spans the 1970s to the present day and proves to readers just how essential mental health activism is to every person in this country, whether you have a current psychiatric diagnosis or not. In Fighting for Recovery, professor and mental health advocate Phyllis Vine tells the history of the former psychiatric patients, families, and courageous activists who formed a patients’ liberation movement that challenged medical authority and proved to the world that recovery from mental illness is possible.

In Organizational Betrayal, educational researcher Charol Shakeshaft advocates a system-wide approach for safeguarding K–12 students against educator sexual misconduct. Based on decades of inquiry into cases of student abuse in educational systems, the work reveals that sexual abuse of children in US K–12 schools is more prevalent than we'd like to believe. Examining the root causes and contexts, Shakeshaft concludes that school cultures and institutional structures are often complicit in cases of sexual misconduct.

In From Reopen to Reinvent, distinguished education strategist Michael B. Horn delivers a provocative and eye-opening call to action for the overthrow of an education system that is not working well for any of its students. Grounded in what educators should build in its place to address the challenges that stem from widespread unmet learning needs, the book walks listeners through the design of a better path forward. It offers a prescriptive and holistic approach to the purpose of schooling, the importance of focusing on mastery for each student, and the ideal use of technology.

In this genial and challenging overview of endless debates over school reform, Rick Hess shows that even bitter opponents in debates about how to improve schools agree on much more than they realize - and that much of it must change radically. Cutting through the tangled thickets of right- and left-wing dogma, he clears the ground for transformation of the American school system. Arguing that a fundamentally 19th-century system can't be right for a 21st-century world, Hess suggests that uniformity gets in the way of quality, and urges us to create a much wider variety of schools, to meet a greater range of needs for different kinds of talents.

From the director of Race to Nowhere, the popular 2010 documentary on our education system that has become a long-running grassroots phenomenon, and a new film, Beyond Measure, comes a groundbreaking audiobook for parents, students, and educators on how to revolutionize learning, prioritize children's health, and reenvision success for a lifetime.

Beyond These Walls is an ambitious and far-ranging exploration that tracks the legacy of crime and imprisonment in the United States, from the historical roots of the American criminal justice system to our modern state of over-incarceration, and offers a bold vision for a new future. Author Tony Platt, a recognized authority in the field of criminal justice, challenges the way we think about how and why millions of people are tracked, arrested, incarcerated, catalogued, and regulated in the United States.

Children and adults with learning or attention challenges are not broken. They don’t need to be fixed, but they do have some roadblocks to learning as easily and enjoyably as they could. Roadblocks can be removed. A stone can be taken out of a shoe. Neuroscience research and decades of clinical evidence prove that struggles associated with dyslexia and learning disabilities can be eliminated.