Non-Fiction Books
Book by Rothstein, Richard
Book by Rasell, Edith, Bluestone, Barry, Mishel, Lawrence
According to conventional wisdom, American public schools have suffered a terrible decline and are in need of dramatic reform. Today's high school students, it is alleged, display an ignorance of things that every elementary student knew a generation ago. American business leaders warn that rising illiteracy and "innumeracy" threaten our competitiveness in the global marketplace. Political scientists worry that poor schooling is undermining the very foundations of our democracy as American adults exercise their citizenship on the basis of dumbed-down sound-bites. But are things really that bad? What evidence are these criticisms based on, and does it hold up under examination? In this book, Richard Rothstein analyzes the statistical and anecdotal evidence and shows that public schools, by and large, are not falling down on the job of educating our children. To the contrary, by many measures they are doing better than in the past. Minority students have improved their test scores significantly, and overall dropout rates have fallen. Moreover, our schools educate more poor children, and more children whose native language is foreign, than ever before. Further improvement in American education, Rothstein argues, should be based on an accurate appraisal of strengths and weaknesses rather than on exaggeration. Rothstein shows in convincing detail how standardized tests comparing American students' performance today with that of the past, and with student performance internationally, frequently confuse apples with oranges. The nation's student population today is very different from that of decades ago and from the student population in other nations. As critics of public education promote private alternatives and politicians debate the value of standardized national testing, The Way We Were? is especially timely.
Can Public Schools Learn From Private Schools? reports on case studies of eight public and eight private schools, conducted to determine whether there are any identifiable and transferable private school practices that public schools can adopt in order to improve student outcomes. The evidence from interviews with teachers, administrators, and parents yields a surprising answer, one that should inform our policy debates about school choice, vouchers, public school funding, and other education issues.
Private schools always provide a better education than public schools. Or do they? Inner-city private schools, most of which are Catholic, suffer from the same problems neighboring public schools have including large class sizes, unqualified teachers, outdated curricula, lack of parental involvement and stressful family and community circumstances. Straightforward and authoritative, All Else Equal challenges us to reconsider vital policy decisions and rethink the issues facing our current educational system.
For many years up until 1997, Korea was widely seen in economic and financial circles as something of a miracle. The financial crisis that Korea experienced then did much to set its economy back, but by 2001 it was still the 13th largest economy in terms of GDP in the world. This enticing collection, with contributions from experts with an impressive knowledge of Korea and its economy, charts not only the well documented causes of the crisis, but more importantly, its response and recovery from it. With an admirable scholarly rigour, the book covers such topics as: *the origin and evolution of the Korean economic system and its special factors including chaebols *Korean industries since the crisis *What happened to the money after the capital flight of the crisis and did the USA benefit? "The Korean Economy at the" "Crossroads" is intended and recommended not only for students and academics involved in international finance, economics and Asian studies, but also for the business leaders and policy makers who can draw lessons from the books important analyses.
It seems to be a common-sense argument that, if teachers know how to teach reading, or math, or any other subject, and if schools emphasize the importance of these tasks and permit no distractions, children should be able to learn regardless of their family income or skin color. But this perspective is misleading and dangerous. It ignores how social class characteristics in a stratified society like ours influence learning in school. For nearly half a century, the association between social and economic disadvantage and the student achievement gap has been well known to economists, sociologists, and educators. Most, however, have avoided the obvious implication of this understanding, that raising the achievement of lower-class children requires that public policy address the social and economic conditions of these childrens lives, not just school reform.
Yes, we should hold public schools accountable for effectively spending the vast funds with which they have been entrusted. But accountability policies like No Child Left Behind, based exclusively on math and reading test scores, have narrowed the curriculum, misidentified both failing and successful schools, and established irresponsible expectations for what schools can accomplish. Instead of just grading progress in one or two narrow subjects, we should hold schools accountable for the broad outcomes we expect from public education ―basic knowledge and skills, critical thinking, an appreciation of the arts, physical and emotional health, and preparation for skilled employment ―and then develop the means to measure and ensure schools’ success in achieving them. Grading Education describes a new kind of accountability plan for public education, one that relies on higher-quality testing, focuses on professional evaluation, and builds on capacities we already possess. This important resource: Describes the design of an alternative accountability system that would not corrupt education as does NCLB and its state testing systems Explains the original design of NAEP in the 1960s, and shows why it should be revived. Defines the broad goals of education, beyond math and reading test scores, and reports on surveys to confirm public and governmental support for such goals. Relates these broad goals of education to the desire for accountability in education.
One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of 2017 Longlisted for the National Book Award This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide ( New York Times Book Review ). In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" ( The Atlantic ), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities , it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past. 13 illustrations