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Teacher and author Vivian Paley is highly regarded by parents, educators, and other professionals for her original insights into such seemingly everyday issues as play, story, gender, and how young children think. This book takes a synoptic view of Paley's many books and articles, charting the evolution of Paley's thinking while revealing the seminal characteristics of her teaching philosophy. This analysis leads the text to identify a pedagogical model organized around two complementary principles: a curriculum that promotes play and imagination, and the idea of classrooms as fair places where young children of every color, ability, and disposition are welcome.

Education researchers struggle with the fact that students arrive at school already shaped by their unequal childhoods. Would we see greater gains among less privileged students if they had a more level playing field? Matthew Rafalow’s Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era answers this question by studying digital technology use at three middle schools. In the contemporary moment, kids’ digital skills appear in the form of their digital play with peers, like through social media use, video gaming, and creating online media. Drawing on six hundred hours of observation and over one hundred interviews with teachers, administrators, and students, Digital Divisions documents how teachers differently treat these very similar digital forms differently by school demographic. At a school with mostly wealthy and White youth, digital play is seen as a resource that will help in class and prepare students to be the next big tech CEO. At a school for mostly middle class, Asian-American youth, kids’ digital pursuits are seen as threatening to learning and such these activities are routinely punished. At a school for mostly working class, Latinx students, teachers dismiss the value of digital play in favor of rote skills, like keyboarding, that they believe will prepare their students for the contemporary factory floor. While existing work focuses on the role of parenting in shaping cultural inequality, Digital Divisions offers an in-depth portrait of how teachers operate as gatekeepers for students’ potential—and differently by the race and class of their student body.

Students in special education programs can have widely divergent experiences. For some, special education amounts to a dumping ground where schools unload their problem students, while for others, it provides access to services and accommodations that drastically improve chances of succeeding in school and beyond. This book argues that this inequity in treatment is directly linked to the disparity in resources possessed by the students' parents. Since the mid-1970s, federal law has empowered parents of public school children to intervene in virtually every aspect of the decision making involved in special education. However, this book reveals that this power is generally available only to those parents with the money, educational background, and confidence needed to make effective claims about their children's disabilities and related needs. The author documents this class divide by examining evidence including historic rates of learning disability diagnosis, court decisions, and advice literature for parents of disabled children. In an era of expanding special education enrollment, the book provides an analysis of the way this expansion has created new kinds of inequality.

Math and science hold powerful places in contemporary society, setting the foundations for entry into some of the most robust and highest-paying industries. However, effective math and science education is not equally available to all students, with some of the poorest students—those who would benefit most—going egregiously underserved. This ongoing problem with education highlights one of the core causes of the widening class gap. While this educational inequality can be attributed to a number of economic and political causes, this book demonstrates that it is augmented by a consistent failure to integrate student history, culture, and social needs into the core curriculum. The chapters argue that teachers and schools should create hybrid third spaces—neither classroom nor home—in which underserved students can merge their personal worlds with those of math and science. A host of examples buttress this argument: schools where these spaces have been instituted now provide students with not only an immediate motivation to engage the subjects most critical to their future livelihoods but also the broader math and science literacy necessary for robust societal engagement. The book pushes beyond the idea of teaching for social justice and into larger questions of how and why students participate in math and science.

When we think about school principals, most of us imagine a figure of vague, yet intimidating authority—for an elementary school student, being sent to the principal's office is roughly on par with a trip to Orwell's Room 101. But this book aims to change that. The book offers an intensive and detailed look at principals, painting a portrait of what they do, how they do it, and why. It begins with a brief history of the job before turning to the daily work of a principal. These men and women, the book finds, stand at the center of a constellation of competing interests around and within the school. School district officials, teachers, parents, and students all have needs and demands that frequently clash, and it is the principal's job to manage these conflicting expectations to best serve the public. Unsurprisingly then, the book records its subjects' professional dissatisfactions, but it also depicts the pleasures of their work and the pride they take in their accomplishments. Finally, the book offers a glimpse of the future with an analysis of current issues and trends in education, including the increasing presence of women in the role and the effects of widespread testing mandated by the government.

This book is an ethnography of lower secondary education in contemporary Japan, exploring the competing demands of autonomy, group socialization, and control in junior high school. It is based on fieldwork in schools conducted over more than a dozen years between 1994 and 2007. The book analyzes the implementation of major curricular reforms intended to develop more creative, self-motivated individuals, and shows how schools transformed the reforms to focus them on longstanding concerns about children’s social, emotional, and moral development. The reforms are situated within policy and media debates, and within the socioeconomic context of turn-of-the-century Japan. It is argued that the reforms failed to win the support of teachers because of the considerable new demands they made, which conflicted with existing institutionalized demands on schools, and with teachers’ established beliefs about the primary purposes of lower secondary education. Moreover, there was not enough development of teachers’ capacity to deliver the kind of programs envisaged by the reforms. The book also explores how a range of school structures and practices enabled the maintenance of control, socialization, and the development of limited individual autonomy. Many recent studies have argued that contemporary Japan is undergoing processes of individualization. However, this book shows that such processes can be restrained in some contexts by institutionalized beliefs and practices. It also contrasts individualization and autonomy, and argues that there is potential for individual autonomy to be developed further in Japan through the exploitation of indigenous understandings of mutually supportive social groups.

In this ethnography, the authors spend time with a first-grade classroom led by Ms. Bailey, a teacher who speaks four languages and immigrated from Burundi as a young adult. Ms. Bailey’s class included mostly children of color, many of whom spoke more than one language. Collectively and individually the class had many opportunities to enact their agency as part of their learning. The children could move around, discuss ideas, work together, design projects, initiate activities, talk about their real lives and help one another. The authors also spend time with over 250 superintendents, principals, teachers, immigrant parents and young children ages 5-7 across Texas who watched a twenty minute film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom and had complicated, often negative, responses to what they saw. Using Charles Mill’s concept of the Racial Contract and by engaging work across Latinx, Indigenous and Black diaspora theorizations of race and white supremacy, the authors try to make sense of what the interviews, the film, and the negative reactions to the film mean for the “great equalizer” of early childhood education. How does racism impact what we offer young children at school? And what does it mean for children and families to see school learning as something that requires their obedience rather than their full personhood?