How to Dismantle the English State Education System in 10 Easy Steps


Book Description

'A sharp and incisive account of how state education has been dismantled into a system of competing Multi-Academy Trusts. We were told ‘choice' would deliver higher standards. It didn't. It made the system more chaotic, wasteful and segregated. This book explains how it was done.' Alasdair Smith, National Secretary, Anti Academies Alliance Terry Edwards and Carl Parsons tell the story of the takeover of England's schools by the super-efficient, modernising, academising machine, which, in collaboration with a dynamic, forward-looking government is recasting the educational landscape. England's school system is turbo-charged into a new era and will be the envy of the world, led by Chief Executives of Multi Academy Trusts on bankers' salaries, imposing a slim curriculum, the soundest of discipline regimes and ensuring that highest standards will be achieved even if at the expense of teacher morale, poor service to special needs, off-rolling of students and despite an absolute lack of evidence that this privatised system works.




Future Alternatives for Educational Leadership


Book Description

This book offers provocations for what’s now and what’s next in educational leadership, simultaneously bringing the field both back to its basics—of equity, democracy, humanity, and education for all—and forward to productive, innovative, and necessary possibilities. Written during the pandemic reality of 2020, this collection shares the global voices and expertise of prominent and emerging leaders, scholars, and practitioners in education from the UK, the United States, South America, Canada, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. The authors engage with the complexities and uncertainties of leading in education. They examine research, reflections, and real stories from which school leaders, education system leaders, policymakers, and researchers in the field of educational leadership, can learn, and in which they will find honesty, authority, and inspiration to guide the future of the field. The new perspectives and hopeful alternatives presented in this outstanding book are essential to researchers, school leaders, and policymakers, and are key to advancing education into positive and democratic futures.




Ebook: Evolving Dialogues in Multiculturalism and Multicultural Educatio n


Book Description

“Richard Race has long proven that multicultural education and multiculturalism in [British] education are key to understanding and fostering social and community cohesion. This important book builds on decades of work, adding fresh insights that reflect the complexity of social and political issues faced in the UK… What Race and colleagues have done is both courageous and coruscating.” Professor Paul W Miller, Director of the Institute for Educational & Social Equity, UK “This edited book is a powerful curation of narratives, which set out pertinent and relevant perspectives on evolving dialogues in multiculturalism and multicultural education… It is a timely, comprehensive and insightful tome, which will be a useful addition to any global anti-racist bookshelf.” Dr Susan Davis, Reader in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Education, School of Education and Social Policy, Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK Multicultural dialogues are as important now as ever. This volume explores narratives in education that have developed internationally in response to changing policies and the modern world. Its contributions reflect on the necessity of sustained dialogue within the wider social and political sciences alongside national and international politics, to enable more multicultural voices to be heard and to respond to the challenges of the modern world. Cultural diversity is a great societal strength and globalisation within education can increase our understanding of this. This edited volume: •Comprises work by researchers from across the globe •Draws on real-life case studies and empirical evidence •Consists of 20+ chapters covering a range of topics Building on case studies from England, Turkey, Italy and more, this text transcends national policy to ask what the core values of multicultural education truly are. From policy and pedagogy to the impact on curricula, it is essential reading for students and those working across the fields of education and sociology, particularly with an interest in social justice, inclusion and multiculturalism. Richard Race is Senior Lecturer in Education at Teesside University, UK and a Visiting Professor at Sapienza University, Italy. Richard is a member of the Executive Board of the Society of Educational Studies and Editorial Board Member of the British Journal of Educational Studies.







Capitalism on Campus


Book Description

Capitalism on Campus examines the university’s journey into market hands and the sexual sell-off of students, which has come with it. It raises critical questions about the forces which conjoin higher education to both sex work and declining academic freedom. In so doing it questions the role our institutions of learning have in the cultivation of resistance to capitalism. This is a call to rediscover the emancipatory potential of knowledge.




Ratchetdemic


Book Description

A revolutionary new educational model that encourages educators to provide spaces for students to display their academic brilliance without sacrificing their identities Building on the ideas introduced in his New York Times best-selling book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, Christopher Emdin introduces an alternative educational model that will help students (and teachers) celebrate ratchet identity in the classroom. Ratchetdemic advocates for a new kind of student identity—one that bridges the seemingly disparate worlds of the ivory tower and the urban classroom. Because modern schooling often centers whiteness, Emdin argues, it dismisses ratchet identity (the embodying of “negative” characteristics associated with lowbrow culture, often thought to be possessed by people of a particular ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic status) as anti-intellectual and punishes young people for straying from these alleged “academic norms,” leaving young people in classrooms frustrated and uninspired. These deviations, Emdin explains, include so-called “disruptive behavior” and a celebration of hip-hop music and culture. Emdin argues that being “ratchetdemic,” or both ratchet and academic (like having rap battles about science, for example), can empower students to embrace themselves, their backgrounds, and their education as parts of a whole, not disparate identities. This means celebrating protest, disrupting the status quo, and reclaiming the genius of youth in the classroom.




Democracy and Education


Book Description

. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.




The Teacher Wars


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today—and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools. “[A] lively account." —New York Times Book Review In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change.




How to Defeat Religion in 10 Easy Steps


Book Description

Do you want the greatest challenges of the day to be addressed with thoughtful, reality-based solutions rather than with cherry-picked quotations from scripture? Do you want to shrink religion—especially fundamentalist religion—to the point that it plays no noticeable role in American public life? Do you want right-wing religious leaders to be so unpopular that politicians avoid them rather than pander to them for endorsements? Drawing on the latest social-scientific research on religion to help interested nonbelievers—and even progressive believers—weaken the influence of fundamentalist religion in society at large, How to Defeat Religion in 10 Easy Steps illustrates specific, actionable steps we all can take to facilitate fundamentalist religion's decline. It covers topics as far ranging as education, welfare, sex, science, capitalism, and Christmas, and each of the 10 chapters focuses on a specific action that research has shown can weaken religion, detailing why and how, and concluding with specific recommendations for individuals, local groups, and national organizations.




Understanding, Dismantling, and Disrupting the Prison-to-School Pipeline


Book Description

This volume examines the school-to-prison pipeline, a concept that has received growing attention over the past 10–15 years in the United States. The “pipeline” refers to a number of interrelated concepts and activities that most often include the criminalization of students and student behavior, the police-like state found in many schools throughout the country, and the introduction of youth into the criminal justice system at an early age. The school-to-prison pipeline negatively and disproportionally affects communities of color throughout the United States, particularly in urban areas. Given the demographic composition of public schools in the United States, the nature of student performance in schools over the past 50 years, the manifestation of school-to-prison pipeline approaches pervasive throughout the country and the world, and the growing incarceration rates for youth, this volume explores this issue from the sociological, criminological, and educational perspectives. Understanding, Dismantling, and Disrupting the Prison-to-School Pipeline has contributions from scholars and practitioners who work in the fields of sociology, counseling, criminal justice, and who are working to dismantle the pipeline. While the academic conversation has consistently called the pipeline ‘school-to-prison,’ including the framing of many chapters in this book, the economic and market forces driving the prison-industrial complex urge us to consider reframing the pipeline as one working from ‘prison-to-school.’ This volume points toward the tensions between efforts to articulate values of democratic education and schooling against practices that criminalize youth and engage students in reductionist and legalistic manners.