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The book focuses on governance of K-12 public schools. Governance – the work of institutions that set the rules under which schools must operate – can protect children and prevent misuse of public funds, but it can also prevent teachers and principals from doing their best for children. There are proposals to simplify governance changing by giving control to mayors, eliminating elected school boards, or eliminating local oversight entirely. This book approaches governance from a new angle: who governs is less important than what powers government has. We propose system of “constitutional” limits on what local governing bodies can do, and checks and balances to enforce these limits. The core of the governance system is a local Civic Education Council, a representative democratic body that has unique but also strictly limited powers: to decide what organizations may run schools, but to let individual schools employ teachers and principals; to withdraw support from unproductive schools and to seek better alternatives for children; and to allocate funds to schools based on enrollment but not to create a large central bureaucracy. This maintains local control, but also limits the purview of government action. The book explains constitutional governance in detail and lays out its implications for parents, students, teachers and their unions, state and federal government and the courts. Later chapters address how the laws defining the new system could be stabilized by a combination of structural change in government and political organization.

Economists and other researchers have accumulated abundant evidence that education increases workers’ productivity and thus increases their incomes. Education also leads to improvements in health and provides many other non-monetary benefits. Policymakers in developing countries also agree that there are important benefits from increasing the education of their citizens; governments in developing countries now spend about $700 billion each year on education. Despite this increased spending, 13% of children in developing countries do not finish primary school, and over one third do not enroll in secondary school. Even more worrisome is that there is a large amount of evidence that students in developing countries learn far less than students in developed countries. While spending even more money may increase enrollment and learning, most developing countries face serious budget constraints that prevent them from devoting significantly larger amounts of money to education. Thus there is an urgent need to find specific, and relatively inexpensive, policies that will lead to better education outcomes in those countries. Fortunately, there has been a large increase in research on education in developing countries in the last two decades, yet these findings are scattered in many different academic journals and other types of publications. Given this situation, this volume has three goals. The first is to take stock of what this recent research has found. The second is to present the implications of this research for education policies in developing countries. Finally, the third is to set priorities for future research on education in those countries.

Educational Goods advances a theory of how to combine values and evidence in decision-making about education. The book identifies three kinds of value that must be balanced against each other: a theory of the kind of educational outcomes schools should aim at; a theory of how educational opportunities should be distributed; and independent values that should be considered when they conflict with the first two kinds of value. The evidence that decision-makers should seek out and consider is that which bears on how these values will be realized through the choices they make, and the book articulates a distinctive method for thinking about the evidence in the light of the values. The method is illustrated through consideration of 3 central policy issues: school financing, school accountability systems, and school choice mechanisms

Throughout American history, the primary mission of public schools has been to prepare students to be effective citizens capable of sustaining a vibrant democracy. Over the past half century, however, most American schools have substantially neglected their responsibility to prepare students for civic participation. For example, in 2016, only 43% of voters under 25 turned out to vote and on the 2014 civics exam administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress only 23% of 18 year-olds performed at or above a “proficient” level. African-American and other students of color tend to experience an even more substantial “civic empowerment gap.” This book examines the causes of the decline in civic preparation, and proposes specific policies that states and school systems can adopt to reinvigorate the schools’ ability to prepare students to function productively as civic participants, and considers examples of best practices. Rebell further argues that this civic decline is also a legal failure—a gross violation of both federal and state constitutions. Building on the precedents in the education adequacy cases that have been litigated in 45 of 50 state courts, and the fact that the vast majority of these courts - and the Supreme Court - have specifically held that preparing students to be capable citizens is a primary purpose of public education, the author argues that adoption of effective solutions by states and school systems will require judicial intervention by both state and federal courts. The book proposes specific legal theories and litigation strategies for such court action.

Transforming Japanese Schools is the first qualitative study of educational reform in Japan produced in almost a decade. Focusing on a collection of reforms collectively known as relaxed education (yutori kyoiku), it scrutinizes recent efforts to reduce academic intensity in Japanese schools. These policiies have provoked intense debates in the country, yet are not well understood outside of Asia. The book moves debates about relaxed education from the halls of government offices to the campuses of six elementary and junior high schools, and pinpoints the specific factors that supported and impeded the Ministry’s reform agenda. It also analyzes the challenges teachers faced as they attempted to adjust their behavior to fit reform guidelines. This ethnographic study of educational reform provides fresh insights into a system that is frequently mischaracterized, sensationalized, and misunderstood. It provides concrete evidence of the consequences of shifting to an examination-centered curriculum. This data provide a much needed balance to ideological arguments about the merits of high stakes testing. The insights generated from this study should be of great interest to individuals involved in any major education reform effort, whether the objective is to reduce academic pressure—or to compel students and teachers to work harder.

The book examines previously unexplored implications of two dramatic shifts in the urban educational landscape. The first shift is the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods. The second shift is the rise of “charter schools”—public schools that are privately operated and freed from some state education regulations. Although a great deal is known about how Catholic schools and charter schools function as educational institutions, virtually nothing is known about how they perform as community institutions. This question is at the heart of the book. Drawing primarily upon two sources of data—social-capital data collected by the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and crime data collected at the police-beat level, the book explore the effects of Catholic school closures—and, to a lesser extent, charter school openings—on urban neighborhoods in Chicago. The book replicates this study with analogous data in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. The findings are sobering. They suggest that Catholic schools are important neighborhood institutions and that their closures trigger disorder and crime and suppress social capital in urban neighborhoods. Moreover, the findings suggest that charter schools do not appear to mitigate these effects. The findings portend serious consequences for urban neighborhoods that lose Catholic schools—consequences with important implications for debates about both education and policing policy. In particular, these findings bolster the contested case for school choice efforts that enable students of modest means to spend public funds at private schools.

A little-discussed aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a mandate that requires failing schools to hire after-school tutoring companies—the largest of which are private, for-profit corporations—and to pay them with federal funds. This book takes a hard look at the implications of this new blurring of the boundaries between government, schools, and commerce in New York City, the country's largest school district. As it explains, NCLB—a federally legislated, state-regulated, district-administered, and school-applied policy—explicitly legitimizes giving private organizations significant roles in public education. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book finds that the results are political, problematic, and highly profitable. Bringing to light these unproven, unregulated private companies' almost invisible partnership with the government, it lays bare the unintended consequences of federal efforts to eliminate school failure—not the least of which is more failure.

Discuss real estate with any young family and the subject of schools is certain to come up—in fact, it will likely be a crucial factor in determining where that family lives. Not merely institutions of learning, schools have increasingly become a sign of a neighborhood’s vitality, and city planners have ever more explicitly promoted “good schools” as a means of attracting more affluent families to urban areas, a dynamic process that the author critically examines in this book. Focusing on Philadelphia’s Center City Schools Initiative, she shows how education policy makes overt attempts to prevent, or at least slow, middle-class flight to the suburbs. Navigating complex ethical terrain, the author balances the successes of such policies in strengthening urban schools and communities against the inherent social injustices they propagate—the further marginalization and disempowerment of lower-class families. By asking what happens when affluent parents become “valued customers,” the book uncovers a problematic relationship between public institutions and private markets, where the former are used to leverage the latter to effect urban transformations.

Many of the essays in MOOCs and Their Afterlives argue that what may have been most significant about the advent of massive open online courses produced by companies like Coursera and edX was not the courses themselves, which tended to be remarkably uniform as vehicles for content delivery that used digital learning management systems, but the diversity of pedagogical reactions among administrators, faculty, students, and members of the general public to this particular format for free large-scale distance learning. The authors in this collection include teachers, students, and critics of these courses, as well as those who have experimented with other paradigms influenced by critical pedagogy, open access, and student-centered learning.

In this book, Anne Newman addresses urgent moral and policy questions about educational justice in a democratic society. She focuses on two questions that arise at the intersection of political theory, educational policy, and the law. The first is a theoretical question: What is the place of a right to education in a deliberative democracy? She argues for this right as a matter of equal citizenship, and emphasizes that it must be shielded from the sway of majoritarian policy-making far more carefully than policy-makers and theorists recognize. She then turns to a related practical question: How can this right be realized in the US?She offers two case studies of leading types of rights-based democratic activism: school finance litigation at the state level, and the mobilization of citizens through community-based organizations. She compares the role of rights claims on these different paths to reform, and also considers how democratic ideals may need to be revised in light of the obstacles that reformers face in their advocacy for educational rights. By bringing together philosophical analysis and policy-minded case studies, this book advances understanding of the relationships among moral and legal rights, education reform, and democratic politics.

The problems commonly associated with inner-city schools were not nearly as pervasive a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. This history of race and urban education tells the story of how and why these schools came to serve black children so much worse than their white counterparts. Focusing on Chicago public schools between 1900 and 1960, it compares the circumstances of blacks and white immigrants, groups that had similarly little wealth and status yet came to gain vastly different benefits from their education. Their divergent educational outcomes, the author contends, stemmed from Chicago officials' decision to deal with rising African American migration by segregating schools and denying black students equal resources. The book shows that this divergence deepened because of techniques for managing academic failure that only reinforced inequality. Ultimately, these tactics eroded the legitimacy of the schools in Chicago's black community, leaving educators unable to help its most disadvantaged students.

Educating children and adolescents in public schools about sex is a deeply inflammatory act in the United States. Since the 1980s, intense political and cultural battles have been waged between believers in abstinence until marriage and advocates for comprehensive sex education. This book upends conventional thinking about these battles by bringing the school and community realities of sex education to life through the diverse voices of students, teachers, administrators, and activists. Drawing on ethnographic research in five states, the author reveals important differences and surprising commonalities shared by purported antagonists in the sex education wars, and illuminates the unintended consequences these protracted battles have, especially on teachers and students. Showing that the lessons which most students, teachers, and parents take away from these battles are antithetical to the long-term health of American democracy, she argues for shifting the measure of sex education success away from pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection rates. Instead, the author argues, the debates should focus on a broader set of social and democratic consequences, such as what students learn about themselves as sexual beings and civic actors, and how sex education programming affects school–community relations.

Almost fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, a wealth of research shows that minority students continue to receive an unequal education. At the heart of this inequality is a complex and often conflicted relationship between teachers and civil rights activists, examined fully in this book, which traces the tensions between the two groups in New York City from the Great Depression to the present. While movements for teachers' rights and civil rights were not always in conflict, this book uncovers the ways they have become so, brought about both by teachers who have come to see civil rights efforts as detracting from or competing with their own goals and by civil rights activists whose aims have de-professionalized the role of the educator. Focusing in particular on unionized teachers, the book finds a new vantage point from which to examine the relationship between school and community, showing how in this struggle, educators, activists, and especially our students have lost out.

This book examines the school choices and engagement of middle- and upper middle-class parents in urban education. It is based upon ethnographic research conducted in a California public elementary school affected by demographic change. The book contributes to the literature on economic integration and school choice through its exploration of an understudied phenomenon: school demographic shifts driven by the outreach, marketing, and volunteerism of middle-class parents, rather than by district policies and practices. The findings indicate that the engagement of a racially mixed group of middle- and upper middle-class families in what had been a predominantly African American, working-class school brought new resources, diversity, and educational opportunities to the school. At the same time, however, the demographic, sociocultural, and material changes brought about new and exacerbated old tensions within the school community related to race, class, and residence in the school and broader district. The findings suggest that school reform strategies that depend upon middle-class parent engagement—without policies and practices to ensure that low-income families also participate in and benefit from school change—can create new patterns of educational inequality, often despite parents’ best intentions. The book argues that urban school transformation efforts should be evaluated based upon the goal of equitable developments in urban education. Doing so would require a focus not simply on outcomes like rising test scores and increased enrollment, but also on issues of access and opportunity for low-income students as school communities begin to change.