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In cities across the nation, communities of color find themselves resisting state disinvestment and the politics of dispossession. Students at the Center—a writing initiative based in several New Orleans high schools—takes on this struggle through a close examination of race and schools. The book builds on the powerful stories of marginalized youth and their teachers who contest the policies that are destructive to their communities: decentralization, charter schools, market-based educational choice, teachers union-busting, mixed-income housing, and urban redevelopment. Striking commentaries from the foremost scholars of the day explore the wider implications of these stories for pedagogy and educational policy in schools across the United States and the globe. Most importantly, this book reveals what must be done to challenge oppressive conditions and transform our schools for the benefit of all students.
The student projects presented in this book demonstrate a powerful approach to teaching writing, one that requires no special equipment or resources and can be adapted for students of any age. The key is getting students involved in action research and in writing about issues that are important to them and their communities. Written by public school teachers, these chapters describe projects covering a variety of issues, including avoiding teenage health risks, preserving oral histories, fighting racism, investigating environmental hazards, decreasing instances of teen pregnancy, and much more. Based on a process-model of writing instruction, these projects will show teachers how to engage their students while also teaching the basic skills that appear in educational standards and assessment frameworks.
Compellingly argues that good health is as much social as it is biological, and that the racial health gap and the racial wealth gap are mutually constitutive. The Danger Zone Is Everywhere shows that housing insecurity and the poor health associated with it are central components of an unjust, destructive, and deadly racial order. Housing discrimination is a civil and economic injustice, but it is also a menace to public health. With this book, George Lipsitz reveals how the injuries of housing discrimination are augmented by racial bias in home appraisals and tax assessments, by the disparate racialized effects of policing, sentencing, and parole, and by the ways in which algorithms in insurance and other spheres associate race with risk. But The Danger Zone Is Everywhere also highlights new practices emerging in health care and the law, emphasizing how grassroots community mobilizations are creating an active and engaged public sphere constituency promoting new forms of legislation, litigation, and organization for social justice.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public school board fired nearly 7,500 teachers and employees. In the decade that followed, the city created the first urban public school system in the United States to be entirely contracted out to private management. Veteran educators, collectively referred to as the "backbone" of the city's Black middle class, were replaced by younger, less experienced, white teachers who lacked historical ties to the city. In A Burdensome Experiment, Christien Philmarc Tompkins argues that the privatization of New Orleans schools has made educators into a new kind of racialized worker. As school districts across the nation backslide on school integration, Tompkins asks, who exactly deserves to teach our children? The struggle over this question exposes the inherent antiblackness of charter school systems and the unequal burdens of school choice.
Youth resistance has become a pressing global phenomenon, to which many educators and researchers have looked for inspiration and/or with chagrin. Although the topic of much discussion and debate, it remains dramatically under-theorized, particularly in terms of theories of change. Resistance has been a prominent concern of educational research for several decades, yet understandings of youth resistance frequently lack complexity, often seize upon convenient examples to confirm entrenched ideas about social change, and overly regulate what "counts" as progress. As this comprehensive volume illustrates, understanding and researching youth resistance requires much more than a one-dimensional t...
From 1965 to 2005, the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) defied the South's conservative anti-union efforts to become the largest local in Louisiana. Jesse Chanin argues that UTNO accomplished and maintained its strength through strong community support, addressing a Black middle-class political agenda, internal democracy, and drawing on the legacy and tactics of the civil rights movement by combining struggles for racial and economic justice, all under Black leadership and with a majority women and Black membership. However, the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina provided the state government and local charter school advocates with the opportunity to remake the school system and dismantle the union. Authorities fired 7,500 educators, marking the largest dismissal of Black teaching staff since Brown v. Board of Education. Chanin highlights the significant staying power and political, social, and community impact of UTNO, as well as the damaging effects of the charter school movement on educators.
The United States currently has the largest prison population on the planet. Over the last four decades, structural unemployment, concentrated urban poverty, and mass homelessness have also become permanent features of the political economy. These developments are without historical precedent, but not without historical explanation. In this searing critique, Jordan T. Camp traces the rise of the neoliberal carceral state through a series of turning points in U.S. history including the Watts insurrection in 1965, the Detroit rebellion in 1967, the Attica uprising in 1971, the Los Angeles revolt in 1992, and events in post-Katrina New Orleans in 2005. Incarcerating the Crisis argues that these dramatic events coincided with the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and the stateÕs attempts to crush radical social movements. Through an examination of the poetic visions of social movementsÑincluding those by James Baldwin, Marvin Gaye, June Jordan, JosŽ Ram’rez, and Sunni PattersonÑit also suggests that alternative outcomes have been and continue to be possible.Ê
This collection of historical essays on race develops lines of inquiry into race and social studies, such as geography, history, and vocational education. Contributors focus on the ways African Americans were excluded or included in the social education curriculum and the roles that black teachers played in crafting social education curricula.
Through the lens provided by the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, After Katrina argues that the city of New Orleans emerges as a key site for exploring competing narratives of US decline and renewal at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Deploying an interdisciplinary approach to explore cultural representations of the post-storm city, Anna Hartnell suggests that New Orleans has been reimagined as a laboratory for a racialized neoliberalism, and as such might be seen as a terminus of the American dream. This US disaster zone has unveiled a network of social and environmental crises that demonstrate that prospects of social mobility have dwindled as environmental degradation and coastal erosion emerge as major threats not just to the quality of life but to the possibility of life in coastal communities across America and the world. And yet After Katrina also suggests that New Orleans culture offers a way of thinking about the United States in terms that transcend the binary of national renewal or declension. The post-Hurricane city thus emerges as a flashpoint for reflecting on the contemporary United States.
That education should instill and nurture democracy is an American truism. Yet organizations such as the Business Roundtable, together with conservative philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Walmart’s owners, the Waltons, have been turning public schools into corporate mills. Their top-down programs, such as Common Core State Standards, track, judge, and homogenize the minds of millions of American students from kindergarten through high school. But corporate funders would not be able to implement this educational control without the de facto partnership of government at all levels, channeling public moneys into privatization initiatives, school closings, and high-stakes testing that disc...