Books in the Critical Social Thought series

Examines high-stakes standardized testing in order to illuminate what is really at stake for students, teachers, and communities negatively affected by such testing. This title traces standardized testing's origins in the Eugenics and Social Efficiency movements of the late 19th and early 20th century.

This book provides a framework for understanding the ways in which education policy across organizational settings contributes to the school to prison pipeline, as documented in the literature and as observed by authors in empirical studies of justice involved youth in several school settings.

'So where did you go to school?' is a question that still pricks at our pride and prejudices.There is little research that helps us know just what parents actually do when choosing schools for their children: this book fills the gap.

Using Chicago as a case study of the interconnectedness between neoliberal urban policies on housing, economic development, and education, this book explores the larger implications on equity, justice, and the restructuring of the city. It offers a significant contribution to the various arguments about urban schooling.

This book is a longitudinal ethnographic study that provides insight into how the lives of these men and women have changed over the last two decades - and what their prospects might be for the future.

Through ethnographic research, this book works to discern the overlaps and tensions between the educational visions of African American voucher families and those of powerful conservative educational forces in US society which purport to be allied with them. It also provides a hopeful message and a practical vision.

In dialogues with eleven key thinkers in the area of critical education, this book documents how a tradition of study grew in the United States. Through in-depth interviews these thinkers talk about their personal experiences and their work.

Focuses on the difficult issues in urban education, putting street-savvy students at the forefront of the discussion on how to best make successful changes for inner city schools. Individual chapters discuss depictions of black America, the social complexity of the teacher-student relationship, and more.

Offers an approach to understanding the complex and multi-dimensional perspectives of Black literate lives in the United States. This book reinterprets historiographies of Black self-determination and self-reliance to interrupt stereotypes of African American literacy practices.

In the colorblind era of Post-Civil Rights America, race is often wrongly thought to be irrelevant or, at best, a problem of racist individuals rather than a systemic condition to be confronted. This book interrupts this assumption by reaffirming a critical appreciation of the central role that race and racism still play in schools and society.

Lays out a post-reform agenda that moves beyond the neo-liberal, competition framework to define a accountability, a pedagogy, and a leadership role definition. This book argues for the need to move away from inauthentic and inequitable approaches to school reform in order to start a conversation about an alternative vision of education.

In a conservative educational climate that is dominated by policies like No Child Left Behind, one of the serious effects has been for educators to worry about the politics of what they are teaching and how they are teaching it. This title provides readers an argument for why curricula and teaching based on controversial issues are truly crucial.

This title examines the transitive relation between politics and actual classroom practice. They show that educational policy serves as political propaganda directed at an electorate desperate for change.

Presents an analysis of 'rightist multiculturalism' in the curriculum battle for cultural supremacy. This book reveals the neo-conservative evolution and contradictory ideology of the Core Knowledge school reform movement.