Education

Teachers are striking from coast to coast - not just over money or benefits, but over the lack of resources necessary to support student mental health and social emotional development. Educators are sending a clear, urgent message to local, state, and federal governments and the public: Student learning will not be maximized until student social emotional wellness is prioritized.

All students deserve our best - and especially those who experience racial inequity, toxic stressors, cultural invalidation, homelessness, and other trauma. Today's students deserve teachers who care about their overall wellness as much or even more than their academic well-being and success. Yet inequities abound, and the most vulnerable students who most need resources are often the least likely to receive such support.

So how can we ensure that all students thrive? By building and sustaining the critical wellness approach shared in All Students Must Thrive. This book brings together three theoretical frameworks relevant for equity in schools - wellness, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory - providing a structure through which to apply the authors' strategies and approaches. Offering a multilayered approach to supporting students and their families holistically, this book helps educators of all levels nurture the social emotional wellness that is essential for all students to thrive.

Are you ready to transform today's schools into tomorrow's hubs of learning? Whether you are an educator in a small rural, large urban, or midsize suburban district - whether the student population is largely socioeconomically disadvantaged, racially segregated, or a balanced mosaic from diverse backgrounds - this book will help you understand how to demonstrate to students that they do matter, that their wellness is essential, and that they can thrive in their quest to learn.

It will not be easy work; it will not happen overnight. But you can make a difference in these student's lives. You can disrupt teacher apathy to catalyze change. You can challenge the status quo and reimagine the outdated educational models of the past, helping to create strategic alliances and ecosystems of support that refuse to allow students to fall through the cracks. You can transform our schools and help our students reach their full potential - especially those often overlooked and underserved.

So be bold. Be courageous. Be reflective and dedicate yourself to improving leadership, practice, policy and research that benefits our students. Keep fighting, protesting, praying, and working until all of our students have the education they deserve - because they are worth it.

2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction) Finalist

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

"An astounding look at America's segregated school system, weaving together historical dynamics of race, class, and growing inequality into one concise and commanding story. Cutting School puts our schools at the center of the fight for a new commons."
--Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything

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 tied to race and poverty. Now, in an era characterized by levels of school segregation the country has not seen since the mid-twentieth century, cultural critic and American studies professor Noliwe Rooks provides a trenchant analysis of our separate and unequal schools and argues that profiting from our nation's failure to provide a high-quality education to all children has become a very big business.

Cutting School deftly traces the financing of segregated education in America, from reconstruction through Brown v. Board of Education up to the current controversies around school choice, teacher quality, the school-to-prison pipeline, and more, to elucidate the course we are on today: the wholesale privatization of our schools. Rooks's incisive critique breaks down the fraught landscape of "segrenomics," showing how experimental solutions to the so-called achievement gaps--including charters, vouchers, and cyber schools--rely on, profit from, and ultimately exacerbate disturbingly high levels of racial and economic segregation under the guise of providing equal opportunity.

Rooks chronicles the making and unmaking of public education and the disastrous impact of funneling public dollars to private for-profit and nonprofit operations. As the infrastructure crumbles, a number of major U.S. cities are poised to permanently dismantle their public school systems--the very foundation of our multicultural democracy. Yet Rooks finds hope and promise in the inspired individuals and powerful movements fighting to save urban schools.

A comprehensive, compelling account of what's truly at stake in the relentless push to deregulate and privatize, Cutting School is a cri de coeur for all of us to resist educational apartheid in America.

Famous for his advocacy of 'critical pedagogy', Paulo Freire was Latin America's foremost educationalist, a thinker and writer whose work and ideas continue to exert enormous influence in education throughout the world today. Education for Critical Consciousness is the main statement of Freire's revolutionary method of education. It takes the life situation of the learner as its starting point and the raising of consciousness and the overcoming of obstacles as its goals. For Freire, man's striving for his own humanity requires the changing of structures which dehumanize both the oppressor and the oppressed.

A groundbreaking manifesto about what our nation's top schools should be--but aren't--providing: "The ex-Yale professor effectively skewers elite colleges, their brainy but soulless students (those 'sheep'), pushy parents, and admissions mayhem" (People).

As a professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. His students, some of the nation's brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively and how to find a sense of purpose. Now he argues that elite colleges are turning out conformists without a compass.

Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale's admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics, students are losing the ability to think independently. It is essential, says Deresiewicz, that college be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success in order to forge their own paths. He features quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and offering clear solutions on how to fix it.

"Excellent Sheep is likely to make...a lasting mark....He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America....Mr. Deresiewicz's book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness" (The New York Times).

If you could teach all kids empathy, tolerance, and compassion, wouldn't teaching all things be easier? Bullying prevention and character building programs are deepening our awareness of how today's kids struggle and how we might help, but many agree: They aren't enough to create school cultures where students and staff flourish. This inspired Angela Stockman and Ellen Feig Gray to begin seeking out systems and educators who were getting things right.

Read it today--fix it tomorrow

Their experiences taught them that the real game changers are using a human-centered approach. Inspired by other design thinkers, many teachers are creating learning environments where seeking a greater understanding of themselves and others is the highest standard. They're also realizing that compassion is best cultivated in the classroom, not the boardroom or the auditorium. It's here that we learn how to pull one another close. It's here that we begin to negotiate the distances between us, too.

Ready to begin but uncertain how? Here's what you'll find inside:

Protocols that inspire strengths-focused teaching and learning

Tools for starting hard conversations, coaching critical questioning, and sustaining respectful communication

Experiential learning models that improve school culture

Approaches that encourage activism while enabling people to resolve conflicts peacefully

Design thinking strategies that empower human-centered decision-making

Compassionate classrooms are built one learner at a time. Be that learner. It's time.

"Drop the flashcards--grit, character, and curiosity matter even more than cognitive skills. A persuasive wake-up call."--People

Why do some children succeed while others fail? The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter more have to do with character: skills like perseverance, curiosity, optimism, and self-control.

How Children Succeed introduces us to a new generation of researchers and educators, who, for the first time, are using the tools of science to peel back the mysteries of character. Through their stories--and the stories of the children they are trying to help--Tough reveals how this new knowledge can transform young people's lives. He uncovers the surprising ways in which parents do--and do not--prepare their children for adulthood. And he provides us with new insights into how to improve the lives of children growing up in poverty. This provocative and profoundly hopeful book will not only inspire and engage readers, it will also change our understanding of childhood itself.

"Illuminates the extremes of American childhood: for rich kids, a safety net drawn so tight it's a harness; for poor kids, almost nothing to break their fall."--New York Times

"I learned so much reading this book and I came away full of hope about how we can make life better for all kinds of kids."--Slate

Play is how children explore, discover, fail, succeed, socialize, and flourish. It is a fundamental element of the human condition. It's the key to giving schoolchildren skills they need to succeed--skills like creativity, innovation, teamwork, focus, resilience, expressiveness, empathy, concentration, and executive function. Expert organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control agree that play and physical activity are critical foundations of childhood, academics, and future skills--yet politicians are destroying play in childhood education and replacing it with standardization, stress, and forcible physical restraint, which are damaging to learning and corrosive to society.

But this is not the case for hundreds of thousands of lucky children who are enjoying the power of play in schools in China, Texas, Oklahoma, Long Island, Scotland, and in the entire nation of Finland. In Let the Children Play, Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish educator and scholar, and Fulbright Scholar William Doyle make the case for helping schools and children thrive by unleashing the power of play and giving more physical and intellectual play to all schoolchildren.

In the course of writing this book, Sahlberg and Doyle traveled worldwide, reviewed over 700 research studies, and conducted interviews with over 50 of the world's leading authorities on education. Most intriguingly, Let the Children Play provides a glimpse into the play-based experiments ongoing now all over the world, from rural China, Singapore, and Scotland to North Texas and Oklahoma, as well as the promising results of these bold new approaches. Readers will find the book to be both a call for change and a guide for making that change happen in their own communities.

"Boaler is one of those rare and remarkable educators who not only know the secret of great teaching but also know how to give that gift to others." -- CAROL DWECK, author of Mindset

"Jo Boaler is one of the most creative and innovative educators today. Limitless Mind marries cutting-edge brain science with her experience in the classroom, not only proving that each of us has limitless potential but offering strategies for how we can achieve it." -- LAURENE POWELL JOBS

"A courageous freethinker with fresh ideas on learning." -- BOOKLIST

In this revolutionary book, a professor of education at Stanford University and acclaimed math educator who has spent decades studying the impact of beliefs and bias on education, reveals the six keys to unlocking learning potential, based on the latest scientific findings.

From the moment we enter school as children, we are made to feel as if our brains are fixed entities, capable of learning certain things and not others, influenced exclusively by genetics. This notion follows us into adulthood, where we tend to simply accept these established beliefs about our skillsets (i.e. that we don't have "a math brain" or that we aren't "the creative type"). These damaging--and as new science has revealed, false--assumptions have influenced all of us at some time, affecting our confidence and willingness to try new things and limiting our choices, and, ultimately, our futures.

Stanford University professor, bestselling author, and acclaimed educator Jo Boaler has spent decades studying the impact of beliefs and bias on education. In Limitless Mind, she explodes these myths and reveals the six keys to unlocking our boundless learning potential. Her research proves that those who achieve at the highest levels do not do so because of a genetic inclination toward any one skill but because of the keys that she reveals in the book. Our brains are not "fixed," but entirely capable of change, growth, adaptability, and rewiring. Want to be fluent in mathematics? Learn a foreign language? Play the guitar? Write a book? The truth is not only that anyone at any age can learn anything, but the act of learning itself fundamentally changes who we are, and as Boaler argues so elegantly in the pages of this book, what we go on to achieve.

The "powerful" (Michelle Alexander) exploration--featured by The Atlantic, Essence, the Washington Post, New York magazine, NPR, and others--of the harsh and harmful experiences confronting Black girls in schools

In a work that Lisa Delpit calls "imperative reading," Monique W. Morris (Black Stats, Too Beautiful for Words) chronicles the experiences of Black girls across the country whose intricate lives are misunderstood, highly judged--by teachers, administrators, and the justice system--and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Called "compelling" and "thought-provoking" by Kirkus Reviews, Pushout exposes a world of confined potential and supports the rising movement to challenge the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures.

Called a book "for everyone who cares about children" by the Washington Post, Morris's illumination of these critical issues is "timely and important" (Booklist) at a moment when Black girls are the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system. Praised by voices as wide-ranging as Gloria Steinem and Roland Martin, and highlighted for the audiences of Elle and Jet right alongside those of EdWeek and the Leonard Lopate Show, Pushout is a book that "will stay with you long after you turn the final page" (Bookish).

How to educate the next generation of college students to invent, to create, and to discover--filling needs that even the most sophisticated robot cannot.

Driverless cars are hitting the road, powered by artificial intelligence. Robots can climb stairs, open doors, win Jeopardy, analyze stocks, work in factories, find parking spaces, advise oncologists. In the past, automation was considered a threat to low-skilled labor. Now, many high-skilled functions, including interpreting medical images, doing legal research, and analyzing data, are within the skill sets of machines. How can higher education prepare students for their professional lives when professions themselves are disappearing? In Robot-Proof, Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun proposes a way to educate the next generation of college students to invent, to create, and to discover--to fill needs in society that even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence agent cannot.

A "robot-proof" education, Aoun argues, is not concerned solely with topping up students' minds with high-octane facts. Rather, it calibrates them with a creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover, or create something valuable to society--a scientific proof, a hip-hop recording, a web comic, a cure for cancer. Aoun lays out the framework for a new discipline, humanics, which builds on our innate strengths and prepares students to compete in a labor market in which smart machines work alongside human professionals. The new literacies of Aoun's humanics are data literacy, technological literacy, and human literacy. Students will need data literacy to manage the flow of big data, and technological literacy to know how their machines work, but human literacy--the humanities, communication, and design--to function as a human being. Life-long learning opportunities will support their ability to adapt to change.

The only certainty about the future is change. Higher education based on the new literacies of humanics can equip students for living and working through change.

In this inspiring collection, the award-winning, bestselling author--and MacArthur genius--gathers all-star advice for K-12 teachers on engaging students around today's toughest issues

Is it okay to discuss politics in class? What are constructive ways to help young people process the daily news coverage of sexual assault? How can educators engage students around Black Lives Matter? Climate change? Confederate statue controversies? Immigration? Hate speech?

Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children, a classic text on cultural slippage in classrooms, has sold over a quarter million copies. In Teaching When the World Is on Fire, Delpit now turns to a host of crucial issues facing teachers in these tumultuous times. Delpit's master-teacher wisdom tees up guidance from beloved, well-known educators along with insight from dynamic principals and classroom teachers tackling difficult topics in K-12 schools every day.

This honest and rich collection brings together essential observations on safety from Pedro Noguera and Carla Shalaby; incisive ideas on traversing politics from William Ayers and Mica Pollock; Christopher Emdin's instructive views on respecting and connecting with black and brown students; Hazel Edwards's crucial insight about safe spaces for transgender and gender-nonconforming students; and James W. Loewen's sage suggestions about exploring symbols of the South; as well as timely thoughts from Bill Bigelow on teaching the climate crisis--and on the students and teachers fighting for environmental justice.

An energizing volume that speaks to our contentious world and the necessary conversations we all must have about it, Teaching When the World Is on Fire is sure to inspire teachers to support their students in navigating the current events, cultural shifts, and social dilemmas that shape our communities and our country.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Lisa Delpit

Politics Matters

I Shall Create!
William Ayers

Teaching Politics in the Age of Trump
Justin Christensen

The Three Illusions
Julia Putnam

Standing Up Against Hate
Mica Pollock

Yes, Race and Politics Belong in the Classroom
H. Richard Milner IV

Safety Matters

Cops or Counselors?
Pedro A. Noguera

How Hurricane Harvey Altered My Perspective as a Teacher
Jeff Collier

I Was Raised to Believe Education Could Keep Me Safe
fredrick scott salyers

Calling on Omar
Carla Shalaby

School Justice
T. Elijah Hawkes

Race Matters

Don't Say Nothing
Jamilah Pitts

Black Teachers, Black Youth, and Reality Pedagogy
Christopher Emdin

How One Elementary School Sparked a Citywide Movement to Make Black Students: Lives Matter
Wayne Au and Jesse Hagopian

The Fire
Sarah Ishmael and Jonathan Tunstall in conversation

Engaging and Embracing Black Parents
Allyson Criner Brown

Who Do I Belong To?
Natalie Labossiere

To My Sons' Future Teacher, Colleague, Sister/Brother, Co-madre, Maestra, Comrade, Friend
Crystal T. Laura

Gender and Sex Ed Matter

Sexual Harassment and the Collateral Beauty of Resistance
Camila Arze Torres Goitia

Believe Me the First Time
Dale Weiss

Nothing About Us, Without Us, Is for Us
Hazel Edwards and Maya Lindberg in conversation

Climate Matters

Climate Science Meets a Stubborn Obstacle: Students
Amy Harmon

Teachers vs. Climate Change
Bill Bigelow

Culture Matters

Teaching Middle School Students to Advocate
Carolina Drake

Why I Teach Diverse Literature
Noah Cho

Love for Syria
Cami Touloukian

Correct(ed): Confederate Public History
James Loewen

Creating Inclusive Classrooms for Muslim Children
Deborah Almontaser

Appendix: Books on Immigration for Young Readers
Jay Fung

During the 2016 school year, innovation expert Ted Dintersmith took an unprecedented trip across America. He visited all fifty states, seeking to raise awareness about the urgent need to reimagine education to prepare students for the career and citizenship demands of an increasingly-innovative world.

As he traveled, though, Dintersmith met innovative teachers all across the country -- teachers doing extraordinary things in ordinary settings, creating innovative classrooms where children learn deeply and joyously. Each day, these students are engaged and inspired by their teachers, who in turn help children develop purpose, agency, essential skill sets and mind-sets, and deep knowledge. The insights of these teachers offer a vision of what school could be, and a model for how to help schools achieve it.