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An incisive investigation of the often fraught student-transfer pathways from community colleges to four-year institutions—and a blueprint for process reform
By taking a global perspective on teaching English, this work takes into account a wide variety of challenges English teachers face and stresses the importance of networking and communicating with colleagues around the world as a means of overcoming those challenges. A richly differentiated view on what it means to be an English teacher is offered, as are fascinating narratives about the diverse efforts of teachers in different communities. Points of view from contributors in North America, Australia, Chile, New Zealand, New Guinea, South Africa, and the United Kingdom are expressed and placed in an illuminating context with practical and theoretical considerations about teaching English.
Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush agreed on little, but united behind the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Passed in late 2001, it was hailed as a dramatic new departure in school reform. It would make the states set high standards, measure student progress, and hold failing schools accountable. A decade later, NCLB has been repudiated on both sides of the aisle. According to Jal Mehta, we should have seen it coming. Far from new, it was the same approach to school reform that Americans have tried before. In The Allure of Order, Mehta recounts a century of attempts at revitalizing public education, and puts forward a truly new agenda to reach this elusive goal. Not once, not twice, but three se...
The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) is a household survey conducted periodically by the Department of Education that evaluates the literacy skills of a sample of adults in the United Stages ages 16 and older. NAAL results are used to characterize adults' literacy skills and to inform policy and programmatic decisions. The Committee on Performance Levels for Adult Literacy was convened at the Department's request for assistance in determining a means for booking assessment results that would be useful and understandable for NAAL'S many varied audiences. Through a process detailed in the book, the committee determined that five performance level categories should be used to characterize adults' literacy skills: nonliterate in English, below basic literacy, basic literacy, intermediate literacy, and advanced literacy. This book documents the process the committee used to determine these performance categories, estimates the percentages of adults whose literacy skills fall into each category, recommends ways to communicate about adults' literacy skills based on NAAL, and makes suggestions for ways to improve future assessments of adult literacy.
Disciplining the Poor explains the transformation of poverty governance over the past forty years—why it happened, how it works today, and how it affects people. In the process, it clarifies the central role of race in this transformation and develops a more precise account of how race shapes poverty governance in the post–civil rights era. Connecting welfare reform to other policy developments, the authors analyze diverse forms of data to explicate the racialized origins, operations, and consequences of a new mode of poverty governance that is simultaneously neoliberal—grounded in market principles—and paternalist—focused on telling the poor what is best for them. The study traces the process of rolling out the new regime from the federal level, to the state and county level, down to the differences in ways frontline case workers take disciplinary actions in individual cases. The result is a compelling account of how a neoliberal paternalist regime of poverty governance is disciplining the poor today.
Today, a college education is increasingly viewed as the gateway to the American Dream—a necessary prerequisite for social mobility. Yet recent policy reforms in the United States effectively steer former welfare recipients away from an education that could further their career prospects, forcing them directly into the workforce where they often find only low-paying jobs with little opportunity for growth. In Putting Poor People to Work, Kathleen Shaw, Sara Goldrick-Rab, Christopher Mazzeo, and Jerry A. Jacobs explore this troubling disconnect between the principles of "work-first" and "college for all." Using comprehensive interviews with government officials and sophisticated data from s...
Explores the ways welfare recipients lack adequate political representation Who deserves public assistance from the government? This age-old question has been revived by policymakers, pundits, and activists following the massive economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anne Whitesell takes up this timely debate, showing us how our welfare system, in its current state, fails the people it is designed to serve. From debates over stimulus check eligibility to the uncertain future of unemployment benefits, Living Off the Government? tackles it all. Examining welfare rules across eight different states, as well as 19,000 state and local interest groups, Whitesell shows how we determine who is—...
We tend to view education primarily as a way to teach students skills and knowledge that they will draw upon as they move into their adult lives. However, schools do more than educate students—they also place students into categories, such as kindergartner, English language learner, or honor roll student. In Schooled & Sorted, Thurston Domina, Andrew M. Penner, and Emily K. Penner, explore processes of educational categorization in order to explain the complex relationship between education and social inequality—and to identify strategies that can help build more just educational systems. Some educational categories have broadly egalitarian consequences. Indeed, Domina, Penner, and Penne...
In the United States, the nomenclature of adult education includes adult literacy, adult secondary education, and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) services provided to undereducated and limited English proficient adults. Those receiving adult education services have diverse reasons for seeking additional education. With the passage of the WIA, the assessment of adult education students became mandatory-regardless of their reasons for seeking services. The law does allow the states and local programs flexibility in selecting the most appropriate assessment for the student. The purpose of the NRC's workshop was to explore issues related to efforts to measure learning gains in adult basic education programs, with a focus on performance-based assessments.
The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the most unequal income distribution of any advanced industrialized nation. While other developed countries face similar challenges from globalization and technological change, none rivals America's singularly poor record for equitably distributing the benefits and burdens of recent economic shifts. In Categorically Unequal, Douglas Massey weaves together history, political economy, and even neuropsychology to provide a comprehensive explanation of how America's culture and political system perpetuates inequalities between different segments of the population. Categorically Unequal is striking both for its theoretical originality and ...