A timely indictment of the corporate takeover of education and the privatization-and profitability-of separate and unequal schools, published at a critical time in the dismantling of public education in America. Public schools are among America's greatest achievements in modern history, yet from the earliest days of tax-supported education-today a sector with an estimated budget of over half a billion dollars-there have been intractable tensions...

“Witnessing Whiteness” invites readers to consider what it means to be white, describes and critiques strategies used to avoid race issues, and identifies the detrimental effect of avoiding race on cross-race collaborations. The author illustrates how racial discomfort leads white people toward poor relationships with people of color. Questioning the implications our history has for personal lives and social institutions, the book considers political,...

Award-winning education journalist Peg Tyre mines up-to-the-minute research to equip parents with the tools and knowledge necessary to get their children the best education possible We all know that the quality of education served up to our children in U.S. schools ranges from outstanding to shockingly inadequate. How can parents tell the difference? And, how do they make sure their kids get what's best? Even the most involved and informed parents...

Ted Dintersmith is one of the nation's leading voices on innovation and education. His four-decade career spans technology, business, public policy, and education philanthropy. He was the executive producer of the acclaimed documentary Most Likely to Succeed, as well as the author, along with Tony Wagner, of the book Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era (Scribner). When he's not visiting schools, he lives in rural Virginia....

As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience, an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers, is in danger of becoming a thing of the past. In this work, the author offers a trenchant defense of such an...

A series of near-riots on campuses aimed at silencing guest speakers has exposed the fact that our universities are no longer devoted to the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth. But, this hostility to free speech is only a symptom of a deeper problem, writes John Ellis. Having watched the deterioration of academia up close for the past fifty years, Ellis locates the core of the problem in a change in the composition of the faculty during this...

A leading educational thinker argues that the American university is stuck in the past--and shows how we can revolutionize it for our era of constant change Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925, when the nation's new universities created grades and departments, majors and minors, in an attempt to prepare young people for a world transformed by the telegraph and the Model T. As Cathy N. Davidson argues in The...

"Everyone agrees that we should graduate as many students as possible, as prepared for colleges and jobs as possible. We all want improved STEM and computer literacy. We're united in our belief that racial testing gaps need to be closed to create more opportunities for everyone. But there are billions of dollars spent every year to get Americans to give up on these shared goals. Why? Race to the Bottom is the first comprehensive expose of the way...

Do teachers have a front row seat to America’s decline? Jeremy S. Adams, a teacher at both the high school and college levels, thinks so. Adams has spent decades trying to instill wisdom, ambition, and a love of learning in his students. And yet, as he notes, when teachers get together, they often share an arresting conclusion: Something has gone terribly wrong. Something essential is missing in our young people. Their curiosity seems stunted, their...

The problem with our nation's schools today is not just the low-test scores in basic reading and math, which are an obstacle for the economy, not to mention students' futures. The challenge is that K-12 instruction has been hijacked by Critical Theorists who are "skeptical" of representative government and the freedoms we cherish. The debates over the retelling of America's past, on display in local school board meetings as well as conflicts between...