New Books in Education

Battles over school politics from curriculum to funding to voucher systems are key and contentious features of the political landscape today. Many of these familiar fights started in the 1970s. However, these battles have roots even earlier in mid-twentieth century school reform debates according to Campbell F. Scribner of the University of Maryland-College Park, who has a new book on the topic, The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy (Cornell University Press, 2016). The Fight for Local Control discusses rural struggles for local control of school districts in this earlier period, mostly in the North, and their connection to the later suburban/urban battles. Rural resistance to the closing of one-room schools and the consolidation of small school districts provided a language and model that was then used by suburban communities to fight urban, state, and federal regulation of their schools, including the famously contentious fights over integration in the form of busing. The book also examines how conservatives later abandoned local control arguments in favor of individual choice policies. In this episode of the podcast, Scribner discusses how he got into the topic and the main insights of the book. He tells us about the regional differences in school systems and education politics. He explains some of the virtues and pitfalls of local control arguments and how his book might inform our thinking about current education politics. Finally, he also talks about doing research on rural schools with sparse, decentralized records. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

The school structures we present to teachers can sometimes resemble two extremes. In the first set of circumstances, teachers have enormous autonomy over what they teach, when they teach it, and how they teach it. In the second, they have almost no choices whatsoever. The texts are all provided, along with the objectives, the script, and the pacing guide. I am not sure that either of these working conditions are sustainable longterm. Obviously, no one enjoys being told exactly what to do. It conveys a lack of trust and respect. But it is an awesome responsibility to be told that everything is up to you. When we live in a culture that continually reinforces the idea that the longterm success of every student is tied to a single teacher’s priorities, words, and actions, this is a recipe for burnout. Are there practices that provide room for creativity without placing an unreasonable burden on individual teachers? How might teachers’ aims inform their choices? How can all teachers facilitate deeper learning in a sustainable way? In Learning That Lasts: Challenging, Engaging, and Empowering Students with Deeper Instruction (Jossey-Bass, 2016) Ron Berger and co-authors, Libby Woodfin and Anne Vilen, outline instructional moves, lesson structures, and discussion protocols that ask more from students and work in a variety of teaching contexts. Woodfin joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work with Expeditionary Learning on its website. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Paula S. Fass is a professor of history emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton University Press, 2016) traces the changing views of childhood and childrearing as it followed the fortunes of the nation. Beginning with the nation’s founding when independence was fostered in children, to the nineteenth-century sentimental view of childhood as a time of innocence, to today’s parental anxiety about their children’s success, Fass examines both the changing opinions of childrearing experts and the class differentiated practices of rural and urban Americans. As childhood extended into late adolescences the transition to adulthood was harder to define. Fass challenges parents to identify with what they share with previous generations and reconnect with the values that set American childhood apart from the rest of the world: the fostering of independence, self-definition, and competence. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Russell Rickford is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University. We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power and the Radical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an intellectual history of the Pan African nationalist schools that emerged in the late 1960s from dissatisfaction with urban school desegregation and its failure to provide an equal education and foster racial pride. Influenced by Third World theories and African anti-colonial campaigns, these black institutions promoted self-determination and black political sovereignty. Beginning with the campaigns for the community control of schools to visions of a Black University, Rickford identifies the key ideological strengths and weaknesses that ultimately resulted in the failure to build strong independent institutions necessary for cultural renewal. The Afrocentric ideas and schools that survived were congruent with a neoliberal ideology that elided the socio-economic conditions of African Americans. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Comes of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Dr. Jon Hale, Assistant Professor of Educational History, Department of Teacher Education, College of Charleston, joins the New Books Network to discuss his new book, entitled The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Columbia University Press, 2016). Through primary interviews and in-depth historical analysis, the author provides a bottom-up view of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, an important legacy to the US Civil Rights Movement. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Why does higher education still matter? In Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters, Les Back, a professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, offers a series of reflections framed by the time of the academic year. The first book from Goldsmiths Press, Academic Diary consists of short entries that think through the problems of university management, defend the idea of scholarship, and consider what ideas of being ‘honored’ as an academic might mean. Other chapters extol the virtues of the library and take a witty and wry look at the academy. Thus, the book, with its insights into academic life as well as broader analysis of the social forces shaping the university, offers a picture of the contemporary university, illuminating the pleasures and pains of working within this modern institution. Ultimately, Academic Diary offers a defense of the idea of the university and will be relevant and readable to anyone working or interested in the sector. Dave OBrien is the host of New Books in Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Dr. Chuing Prudence Chou, Professor, Department of Education, National Chengchi University, rejoins the New Books Network to discuss her newly edited volume, Chinese Education Models in a Global Age (Springer, 2016), co-edited with Jonathan Spangler, Doctoral Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica. The book brings together a diverse group of scholars from around the world to discuss and explore the meanings and challenges of a supposed Chinese education model. Not only focusing on the People’s Republic of China, the authors attempt to build their analysis around the many represented experiences in education found in Chinese communities throughout the world. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

I grew up in Michigan, in the United States, where I was surrounded by places named with Native American names. I drove to Saginaw to play in basketball tournaments and to Pontiac to watch an NBA team play. Now in Kansas, I live near towns called Kiowa and Cherokee. But for much of my life, despite my profession as an historian, names like these were just background noise in the everyday reality of my life, not reminders of the fact that Native Americans have lived in and with the presence of settlers for centuries. Andrew Woolford has done much to help me recognize and understand this. Woolford is one of the preeminent scholars on the relationship between “natives” and settlers in the United States and Canada. He is also one of the most thoughtful voices in considering whether this relationship should be called genocidal. In my discussion with him, we tried to get at the essence of his ideas by looking at three of his works. We begin with the volume of essays he co-edited with Alexander Hinton and Jeff Benvenuto, titled Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. The book collects the contributions of a variety of authors researching the issue. The essays generally offer focused examinations of specific issues of events. But the editors also offer valuable reflections on what we know and don’t know about the subject. It’s an outstanding resource for people interested in the question broadly. We then move on to Woolford’s own work, titled This Benevolent Experiment:Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).The book is a wonderful examination of the Indigenous school systems in Canada and the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Woolford extracts from his research a wonderful new metaphor to illustrate the way in which genocide worked in North America, one that has much broader utility in the field. And he offers a careful, well-reasoned explanation for why he thinks genocide is indeed the most appropriate term for the cultural and physical violent that characterized the period. Both books are excellent. Finally, while we didn’t have much time to address it specifically, Woolford edited a recent special edition of the Journal of Genocide Research focusing on the topic. It’s also a rich source of information and insight. Put together, the three works offer perhaps the best way into the growing field of genocide studies in North America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Rajika Bhandari, Deputy Vice President, Research and Evaluation Institute of International Education (IIE), and Mirka Martel, Assistant Director of Research and Evaluation at IIE, join New Books in Education to discuss a new report from the organization, Social Justice and Sustainable Change: The Impacts of Higher Education (IIE, 2016). This new report is part of a ten-year study of the Ford Foundations International Fellowship Program alumni and their impacts in their communities globally. The report is free to read on IIEs website and very assessable, with data displayed in easy-to-read charts and graphics showing the link between higher education and social justice and the effect that higher education can have on marginalized populations and leadership around the world. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Many of us are familiar with the court-mandated bussing programs created in an effort to achieve school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s. Far fewer of us realize there were also voluntary transfer programs that were crafted in out-of-court settlements in the decades that followed. For example, as part of the Canford Program, wealthy districts like those in Arbor Town accept between 6-60 students from nearby South Bay City, where resources are more scarce. These children who win the lottery have access to all of the same teachers, facilities, and curricular materials as the students living in the surrounding neighborhoods. Still, their experiences are far from the same. Canford students ride the bus each morning. Their trips are long and chaotic, and as a result, they often arrive late, hungry, or unsettled. These students must quickly transition into routines that fail to take this reality into account, and issues of equity quickly arise. Do the benefits of such a program exceed its costs? How might such a program be redesigned? To what extent is the bus (or recess) part of school anyway? In The Bus Kids: Children’s Experiences with Voluntary Desegregation (Yale University Press, 2009), Ira Lit, recounts the experiences of small children participating in an inter-district transfer program designed to allow students living in a low-income community to attend better-resourced schools in other nearby towns. Lit joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work with the Stanford Teacher Education Program on its website.To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him via email at iralit@stanford.edu. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at info@trevormattea.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education