Challenging prevailing interpretations of the Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) that attribute the collapse of the 1960s activist organization to multiple and fractious splinterings, University of Tennessee (at Martin) historian David Barber argues that SDS, and the New Left of which it was a part, failed because their white male, middle class leaders and members were unable and unwilling to rid themselves of “the dominant white culture’s understandings of race, gender, class, and nation…that always placed white people on top” in American society (p. 3, 228).       In successive chapters, Barber asserts that SDS was incapable of imagining, let alone acting, outside the box of white male supremacy. “New Leftists,” he elaborates, did not “question their own racial identities” (p. 16) and as a consequence rejected demands by black power advocates such as Stokeley Carmichael of SNCC and the Black Panther Party that SDS “organize white communities against racism” (p. 51),... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

How has the (post) modern picture book evolved? How do children make sense of (post)modern depictions? What might we learn from international picture books?  These are just some of the questions that this edited volume begins to answer. Postmodern picturebooks: Play, parody, and self-referentiality is one of the edited volumes of the Routledge Research in Education Series. The piece is edited by Lawrence R. Sipe, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sylvia Pantaleo, Associate Professor at the University of Victoria. The chapter contributors represent international contexts including the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, United States, and Canada while including seasoned scholars as well as graduate students. The purpose of this intriguing book is to offer readers recent research, theoretical frameworks, definitions related to the topic at hand, historical depictions, literature reviews, as well as practical pedagogical applications. The impetus for this edited piece is to... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

In 2005 faculty members, school administrators, and doctoral students from the Harvard Graduate School of Education joined school leaders from the Boston Public Schools to produce Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning. Edited by Kathryn Boudett, Elizabeth City, and Richard Murnane, the book “offered a practical model for using data to identify common student learning needs, to generate and implement instructional solutions, and to measure those solutions’ effectiveness at raising student achievement within a department, grade-level, or school” (p. vii). While the Data Wise model was widely disseminated, there were calls from school leaders for stories from real schools implementing it. Data Wise in Action responds to such requests by presenting case studies from eight very different schools to demonstrate how each implements a different phase of the eight step collaborative, evidence-based Data Wise instructional improvement process. With many school improvement models,... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Keeping the Promise: Essays on Leadership, Democracy and Education is an important book, worthy of merit for its thoughtful, in-depth and reformist examination of democratic education! Edited by Dennis Carlson and C.P. Gause, the volume originated from an ongoing, multiyear initiative (1999-2004) of the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University and the Ohio Department of Education. These gatherings of diverse scholars engendered multi-perspectival dialogue about leadership, culture and schooling around key, shared conceptions of democracy. The volume presents a broad-based, critical analysis of economic, social and political factors bearing on school leadership and democracy as its governing ideal. In its totality the book’s deconstruction of established and entrenched discourses of democracy constitutes a significant contribution to scholarship in educational leadership. While a valuable reference within its own field, this work has appeal for broader inquiry in education. The extent to which the volume draws upon critiques of feminist theory,... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Historians Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender have edited a remarkable anthology about a remarkable period in American higher education – namely, documents dealing with the period 1940 to 2005. Were one to have observed carefully the scope of colleges and universities prior to World War II and then revisited the scene early in the 21st century, the transformation would elicit awe and even admiration. The thematic pieces selected by the editors provide a detailed guide for what is higher education’s “Fantastic Voyage.” One temptation is to describe this 523 page volume as a sequel to American Higher Education: A Documentary History, the landmark 1961 two-volumes edited by the late Richard Hofstadter and, once again, Wilson Smith. On closer inspection the recent book is a markedly different kind of work. Whereas the 1961 anthology spans more than 400 years of documents about debates and developments, the 2008 American Higher Education Transformed, 1940-2005,... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Editors Marybeth Gasman, Benjamin Baez, and Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner identify three interlocking goals for their new volume, Understanding Minority-Serving Institutions: advocate for MSIs, identify factors that relentlessly marginalize MSIs, and engage readers in a critique of the central premises within which MSIs and MSI-related scholarship are nested. By and large, they succeed. The essays in this volume provide a thorough introduction to the histories and contributions of MSIs as well as challenges and opportunities associated with being MSIs on the contemporary higher learning landscape. The book’s first section, “Foundations of Minority-Serving Institutions,” begins with the editors’ introduction followed by a concise historical account of the three major types of MSIs: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). The two chapters that follow provide the reader with a taste of the diverse and evocative perspectives that comprise the remainder of the volume: a... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

In his most recent book, Michael Grenfell makes a comprehensive contribution to our understanding of the work of influential French social philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu. As its title implies, this book is for readers interested in Bourdieu’s work on education although his engagement with such topics as culture, economics, art, literature, politics, language and media is also acknowledged. The contribution is timely, enabling Grenfell to knowledgeably review the life work of this key sociological thinker following his recent passing in 2002. Throughout the book, the point is made strongly that Bourdieu’s work must be understood in terms of his own biography. Indeed, this book stands apart from other volumes as a result of Grenfell’s skillful interweaving of the social, economic and political context into which Bourdieu was born and grew up and his various projects and publications. This ‘socio-genetic’ reading helps to offset the misunderstanding that his work has attracted as a... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Gene Glass’s thoughtful and provocative book launches angry thunderbolts from the Olympus of educational research. His main targets are a gaggle of would-be reformers of our schools who do their murky deeds under the guise of rescuing us from educational crisis. Glass is a distinguished pioneer in the statistical analysis of educational data. The major thesis of his somewhat puckishly-named book is that the specter of educational crisis has been evoked to justify a variety of ill-conceived educational adventures, including vouchers, charter schools, high-stakes testing, open enrollment, and many more. These policies, he says, claim to seek greater educational achievements but, in fact, aim to reduce public spending on schooling, and in particular, to reduce the costs of educating black, Hispanic, and poor students. They also tend to promote and subsidize insulated schooling for more affluent whites. He holds that these results are not only the observed consequences of such... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

What is “immersion” and what benefits do “immersion” programs offer students? These are central questions in the fields of second and foreign language teaching and learning, but more broadly to all educators who are attempting to adapt their programs and instructional practices for increasingly ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations. Research on effective programs and classroom practices to enhance bi and multilingualism is scarce, although some patterns regarding age of instruction, length of instruction, and relationships of second language (L2) and first language (L1) learning processes (i.e., “transfer”) are emerging . Defining “Immersion” education and synthesizing the research base regarding the varieties of immersion programs being implemented around the globe are two of the central foci of this edited volume. Some of the key questions this volume explores include: What are the effects of implementation differences (decisions on how program languages are allocated-for example by time, by teacher, by content... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

For students and scholars of education, Faye Harrison’s Outsider Within provides an intriguing entrée to debates and tendencies in sociocultural anthropology over the last forty years or so. To be sure, Harrison occupies a particular place in these debates—the place, as she puts it, of “outsider within.” The book is, therefore, no disinterested treatise. Yet what stands out most in Harrison’s account is her passionate defense of anthropology as a holistic social science that also holds out one of the best hopes for achieving equity and social justice in a troubled global age. She exemplifies such hopes herself as she engages in “reworking anthropology” toward its true promise as a discipline. Professor Harrison brings an impressive and pertinent resume to her task. A Black woman from Norfolk, Virginia, she pursued her education at Brown (undergraduate) and Stanford (graduate) before returning to her native South to teach at a variety of strong... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Patrick Samway’s book, Educating Darfur Refugees, A Jesuit’s Efforts in Chad, is not a book about pedagogy and a philosophy of education. And it is. A memoir chronicling the time he spent in refugee camps on Chad’s side of the Sudanese border, Samway tells us about his efforts to set up schools. As he does so, he teaches us the recent and not so recent history of this part of Africa. We learn about the respective internal affairs of Chad, Libya, and Sudan, but also about the complicated, triangulated power-plays between the three nations as they vie for political influence and oil-drenched economics. We also learn about the ineffective, unhelpful, or indifferent postures offered by foreign nationals. In particular, Samway recalls George W. Bush’s obsession with Iraq as China’s African gaze grows in notable proportion. On leave from an academic post, Samway, a professor and a priest, spends the 2004-2005 academic year... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

As baby boomers begin to retire in the coming decade, the American education system will be forced to deal with the exodus of over half of its teacher workforce. With so many teachers expected to leave the classroom, we must redouble our efforts to keep high-quality teachers in high-need schools.

The present work is an edited volume of papers by education researchers and scholars on the new institutionalism in education. At slightly more than 230 pages, it is a slim and compact work consisting of thirteen chapters, few of which crack twenty pages (inclusive of notes and references). Most of the contributions to this volume began as conference papers, and many retain something of the flavor of this format. Studies are narrowly constructed and arguments succinctly stated, rather than given expansive discussion or treatment. The New Institutionalism in Education is therefore decidedly modest in scope, and is not likely to be entirely satisfying to anyone seeking a comprehensive survey of institutionalist writings in education, or an ambitious effort in agenda-building in education research. And yet, it’s a worthwhile read, if mainly as a fairly brisk introduction to different strands of education research currently taking place under the institutionalist banner, as... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Cuban’s Frogs into Princes: Writings on School Reform provides a trail that traces school reform from 1962, when schools struggled with implementing desegregation policies, to 2007, as schools still struggle to effectively educate diverse student populations. The selections are framed within three perspectives: as an insider, as an outsider, and finally as a teacher/administrator/researcher with a merged perspective on school reform. From the first selection until the last, there is a profound sense of hope in Cuban’s writings, despite historical evidence that educational policymakers seem to persist in making the same mistake over and over by ignoring the role of the teacher in school reform. Despite the passage of time represented in the collection, a similar theme emerges; reforms live or die in the classroom, not the boardroom. The value of the teacher in school reform is first framed in Cuban’s examination of his own teaching. In the 1962 selection, Teaching... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

An essay review of Sherman Dorn's Accountability Frankenstein: Understanding and Taming the Monster

The time has come to face the growing problem of college-loan indebtedness. Otherwise—like the current economic crisis that was partly caused by declining home values—college-loan indebtedness will some day contribute to enormous financial problems for a large number of individual Americans and for the nation as a whole.

The July issue is online.

Knowledge economy, development and the future of higher education is not for the reader seeking a breezy treatment of the future of higher education. This volume, written by Professor Michael A. Peters of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, provides a rigorous intellectual exercise for the reader through a collection of essays that robustly frames the past, present and future of higher education with many references to significant philosophers and intellectuals. My view is that if the reader does not have a working knowledge of the contributions of Karl Marx, Freidrich Hayek, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Martin Heidegger, and Cardinal Newman to intellectual history, this volume will present significant challenges since much of what Peters provides is his analysis of various topics framed by these intellectuals. It is one of a series of books that “…maps the emergent field of educational futures” (p.... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

With The Six Secrets of Change, Michael Fullan returns to the themes that have comprised the guiding principle of his work – change and leadership. His previous book, Turnaround Leadership, focused on what he called “the real reform agenda” or changing schools as a way to reduce the income gap between rich and poor students. Previously, in his seminal work, The New Meaning of Educational Change, Fullan provided practical resources and ideas for school reform. No one can accuse Fullan of thinking small. Using examples from businesses and health and public education systems, The Six Secrets of Change seeks to apply principles that are common to “successful organizational change under complex conditions” (p. vii). A theory of change is useful only if it “travels well,” meaning that it can be applied to different situations and can “practically and insightfully guide the understanding of complex situations and point to actions likely to... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Coming to the second edition of Writing for Social Scientists, I speculated on what occasioned the University of Chicago Press to re-issue this book after twenty-one years. Market readiness and potential sales, almost certainly. Perhaps Howard Becker felt moved to answer the urgent calls of academics confronting daunting transformations wrought by social software, digital media, the “crisis in scholarly publishing” (Waters, 2004), and innumerable threats to academic inquiry  — illustrated by Bruno Labor’s (2004) plaintive mediation on “wars” and the possibilities of critique. In light of these changes, how would Becker revise his approach to writing? Well comme-ci, comme ca. The second edition’s preface offers: “Many things haven’t changed since this book first appeared. But some have …” (viii). In a characteristically low-key manner, Becker notes how computers have affected “… our situations as writers” (viii). Becker describes briefly both the unpredictable influence of computers (Chapter 9) and of university reorganization... (preview truncated at 150 words.)