Learning in Public
Learning in Public

Author: Courtney E. Martin

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0316428256

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This "provocative and personally searching"memoir follows one mother's story of enrolling her daughter in a local public school (San Francisco Chronicle), and the surprising, necessary lessons she learned with her neighbors. From the time Courtney E. Martin strapped her daughter, Maya, to her chest for long walks, she was curious about Emerson Elementary, a public school down the street from her Oakland home. She learned that White families in their gentrifying neighborhood largely avoided the majority-Black, poorly-rated school. As she began asking why, a journey of a thousand moral miles began. Learning in Public is the story, not just Courtney’s journey, but a whole country’s. Many of us are newly awakened to the continuing racial injustice all around us, but unsure of how to go beyond hashtags and yard signs to be a part of transforming the country. Courtney discovers that her public school, the foundation of our fragile democracy, is a powerful place to dig deeper. Courtney E. Martin examines her own fears, assumptions, and conversations with other moms and dads as they navigate school choice. A vivid portrait of integration’s virtues and complexities, and yes, the palpable joy of trying to live differently in a country re-making itself. Learning in Public might also set your family’s life on a different course forever.

The Censors
The Censors

Author: Luisa Valenzuela

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13:

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The only bilingual collection of fiction by Luisa Valenzuela. This selection of stories from "Clara", "Strange things happen here", and "Open door" delve into the personal and political realities under authoritarian rule.

Hella Town
Hella Town

Author: Mitchell Schwarzer

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-08-16

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 0520391535

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Hella Town reveals the profound impact of transportation improvements, systemic racism, and regional competition on Oakland’s built environment. Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger and more glamorous twin, Oakland has a fascinating history of its own. From serving as a major transportation hub to forging a dynamic manufacturing sector, by the mid-twentieth century Oakland had become the urban center of the East Bay. Hella Town focuses on how political deals, economic schemes, and technological innovations fueled this emergence but also seeded the city’s postwar struggles. Toward the turn of the millennium, as immigration from Latin America and East Asia increased, Oakland became one of the most diverse cities in the country. The city still grapples with the consequences of uneven class- and race-based development-amid-disruption. How do past decisions about where to locate highways or public transit, urban renewal districts or civic venues, parks or shopping centers, influence how Oaklanders live today? A history of Oakland’s buildings and landscapes, its booms and its busts, provides insight into its current conditions: an influx of new residents and businesses, skyrocketing housing costs, and a lingering chasm between the haves and have-nots.

Marcus Foster and the Oakland Public Schools
Marcus Foster and the Oakland Public Schools

Author: Jesse J. McCorry

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0520310128

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Critics of public organizations have charged them with rigidity, insensitivity to public needs, inefficiency, and other faults. The charges are not new, but the surge of urban political activism during the 1960s gave a sense of urgency to demands for organizational change. Marcus Foster and the Oakland Public Schools examines an urban political executive’s efforts to meet those demands. In an attempt to reform education bureaucracy, Marcus Foster—former superintendent of schools in Oakland, California—introduced a three-part program of community participation, decentralization, and budgeting. Each component responded to a specific criticism of bureaucracies, and each was strongly supported by students of organizations. The most successful changes were those for which the superintendent controlled the requisite resources, enabling Foster to initiate community involvement and determine its procedures. But where change required existing bureaucratic units to relinquish some of their resources, Foster’s success was more limited. It was not, however, the control of resources by others but the unbridgeable gap between theory and application that burdened efforts to reform budgeting. Jesse J. McCorry shows how the common notion that organizational change is thwarted by bureaucratic recalcitrance and inertia is oversimplified. Broadening analytic perspectives reveals that some bureaucratic reforms, along with their objectives, are beyond the limits of what even the most effective leadership can achieve. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Loving Learning: How Progressive Education Can Save America's Schools
Loving Learning: How Progressive Education Can Save America's Schools

Author: Tom Little

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2015-03-02

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0393246175

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Noted educator Tom Little and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Katherine Ellison reveal the home-grown solution to turning American students into life-long learners. The longtime head of Park Day School, Tom Little embarked on a tour of 43 progressive schools across the country. In this book, his life’s work, he interweaves his teaching experience, the knowledge he gleaned from his trip, and the history of Progressive Education. As Little and Katherine Ellison reveal, these educators and schools invigorate learning and promote inquisitiveness by allowing the curriculum to grow organically out of children's questions—whether they lead to studying the senses, working on a farm, or re-creating a desert ecosystem in the classroom. We see curious students draw on information across disciplines to think in imaginative yet practical ways, like in a "Mini-Maker Faire" or designing and building a chair from scratch. Becoming good citizens was another of Little's goals. He believed in the need for students to learn how to become advocates for themselves, from setting rules on the playground to engaging in issues of social justice in the wider community. Using the philosophy of Progressive Education, schools can prepare students to shape a vibrant future in the arts and sciences for themselves and the nation.

Unconditional Education
Unconditional Education

Author: Robin Detterman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-03-19

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0190886528

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After decades of reform, America's public schools continue to fail particular groups of students; the greatest opportunity gaps are faced by those whose achievement is hindered by complex stressors, including disability, trauma, poverty, and institutionalized racism. When students' needs overwhelm the neighborhood schools assigned to serve them, they are relegated to increasingly isolated educational environments. Unconditional Education (UE) offers an alternate approach that transforms schools into communities where all students can thrive. It reduces the need for more intensive and costly future remediation by pairing a holistic, multi-tiered system of supports with an intentional focus on overall culture and climate, and promotes systematic coordination and integration of funding and services by identifying gaps and eliminating redundancies to increase the efficient allocation of available resources. This book is an essential resource for mental health and educational stakeholders (i.e., school social workers, therapists, teachers, school administrators, and district-level leaders) who are interested in adopting an unconditional approach to supporting the students within their schools.