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"Luck, chance, and randomness are topics that virtually everyone can relate to and that each of us have been affected by. The Random Factor explores these subjects using a vast array of evidence, fresh insights, and compelling stories based upon the author's long standing research. The range of subjects and scholarship is far reaching and compelling. From history, to the natural world, to our everyday lives, chance is shown to play an important role in shaping various outcomes. Just as important, The Random Factor details the dynamics that determine the ways that luck and chance play themselves out, and it reveals the lessons to be learned in terms of guiding our personal lives and social policies. Mark Robert Rank leads his readers on a fascinating journey across the shifting sands of chance and luck. It is a journey that will change the way we fundamentally understand the world we live in and the manner in which our lives unfold"--
Education policymaking is traditionally seen as a domestic political process. The job of deciding where students will be educated, what they will be taught, who will teach them, and how it will be paid for clearly rests with some mix of district, state, and national policymakers. This book seeks to show how global trends have produced similar changes to very different educational systems in the United States and Japan. Despite different historical development, social norms, and institutional structures, the U.S. and Japanese education systems have been restructured over the past dozen years, not just incrementally but in ways that have transformed traditional power arrangements. Based on 124 interviews, this book examines two restructuring episodes in U.S. education and two restructuring episodes in Japanese education. The four episodes reveal a similar politics of structural education reform that is driven by symbolic action and bureaucratic turf wars, which has ultimately hindered educational improvement in both countries.
Why do America's public schools seem unable to meet today's social challenges? As competing interest groups vie over issues like funding and curricula, we seem to have lost sight of the democratic purposes originally intended for public education. Public schools were envisioned by the Founders as democratically run institutions for instilling civic values, but today's education system seems more concerned with producing good employees than good citizens. Meanwhile, our country's diversity has eroded consensus about citizenship, and the professionalization of educators has diminished public involvement in schools. This volume seeks to demonstrate that the democratic purposes of education are ...
"Busing, in which students were transported by school buses to achieve court ordered or voluntary school desegregation, became one of the nation's most controversial civil rights issues in the decades after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Examining battles over school desegregation in cities like Boston, Chicago, New York, and Pontiac, Why Busing Failed shows how school officials, politicians, courts, and the news media valued the desires of white parents more than the rights of black students, and how antibusing parents and politicians borrowed media strategies from the civil rights movement to thwart busing for school desegregation. This national history of busing brings together well-...
Community participation plays a large role in the success or failure of our public schools. This book focuses attention on the problem of inequality in public engagement, considering how race, class, ethnicity, language, and immigration status shape opportunities for engagement. Without the active participation of the public, chances for improving school systems are limited. Without equal opportunity for public engagement, those in the lower reaches of stratified society are left largely on the outside looking in—and that all too easily becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Public Engagement for Public Education speaks to the potential for students, parents, community members, and civic leaders to join forces and create more equitable schooling. Such engagement can expand access to quality educational pathways which in turn paves the way to a stronger voice in society and the promise of the American dream. If segments of society are blocked access to those pathways, the book argues, nothing less than the health of American democracy is at stake.
In the twentieth century, the United States ended some of its most flagrant inequalities. The "rights revolution" ended statutory prohibitions against women's suffrage and opened the doors of voting booths to African Americans. Yet a more insidious form of inequality has emerged since the 1970s—economic inequality—which appears to have stalled and, in some arenas, reversed progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy. In Inequality and American Democracy, editors Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol headline a distinguished group of political scientists in assessing whether rising economic inequality now threatens hard-won victories in the long struggle to achieve political equali...
This book analyzes how public-school closures and the costly battles waged to stop them undermine the citizenship of Black Americans.
Righting Educational Wrongs brings together the work of scholars from the fields of disability studies in education and law to examine contemporary struggles around in-clusion and access to education. Specifically, contributors examine policies and practices as they contribute to or undermine educational access for individuals with disabilities. Kanter and Ferri expand our understanding about the potential of legal studies to inform work around disability studies in education and vice versa. Contributors explore the intersections between disability studies, law, and education, forging a theoretical framework for thinking about educational access. Several essays take a critical look at some of the histories of exclusion in education and the ways that these exclusions have been upheld by a variety of educational policies and practices. Other essays reflect on how students with disabilities and their families experience the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. By bridging various disciplines, Righting Educational Wrongs offers new insights to allow us to better understand the multiple perspectives and voices within the field of disability studies.
In Because of Race, Mica Pollock tackles a long-standing and fraught debate over racial inequalities in America's schools. Which denials of opportunity experienced by students of color should be remedied? Pollock exposes raw, real-time arguments over what inequalities of opportunity based on race in our schools look like today--and what, if anything, various Americans should do about it. Pollock encountered these debates while working at the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in 1999-2001. For more than two years, she listened to hundreds of parents, advocates, educators, and federal employees talk about the educational treatment of children and youth in specific schools ...