New Books in Public Policy

March Madness is big business. Each year the NCAA collects $700 million for television rights to the men’s college basketball tournament, under the terms of a 14-year, $10.8 billion contract with CBS and Turner Broadcasting. The two networks, in turn, bring in just over a billion dollars each year in advertising revenue. And it’s estimated that over nine billion dollars changes hands in bets every year, as some 40 million Americans fill out their brackets to predict the outcome of all 67 games in the three-week tournament. And this is “amateur” sports. In his new book Changing the Playbook: How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports (University of Illinois Press, 2015), historian Howard Chudacoff describes the key turning points that led to today’s big-money world of college sports. Focusing on the decades since World War II, Howard shows how college football, rather than basketball, led to the unchecked power of coaches, athletic directors, and wealthy boosters that we see today. He also explains the NCAA’s rise to authority over college sports, a place now sealed by its control of the March Madness billions. There are plenty of screeds out there against the money and corruption in college sports. But as a historian of sport and a former university representative to the NCAA, Howard offers a different take – a well-researched and illuminating history that is both critical of school administrators and the NCAA but also appreciative of athletics at American universities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Teenagers live in their phones. As an educator you can try to pull them away or meet them where they are. The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) urges educators to meet teens on their must-have device. Author Benjamin Castleman of the University of Virginia shows how text messaging combined with insights from behavioral science―more specifically the fields of behavioral economics and social psychology―can be leveraged to help students complete assignments, perform to their full potential on tests, and choose schools and colleges where they are well positioned for success. In his own research, Castleman has studied how to use personalized text messages to reduce “summer melt,” in which up to 40 percent of high school graduates who have been accepted to college, mostly from underserved communities, fail to show up for the fall semester. Behavioral strategies extend beyond texting and even beyond smartphone technology. By focusing on behavioral changes, Castleman demonstrates that small tweaks in how we ask questions, design applications, and tailor reminders can lead to better decision making and have remarkable impacts on student and school success. The 160-Character Solution makes a broader case for employing these behavioral strategies to improve educational outcomes from preschool all the way to college. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at nudgeblog@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Everyone hates being underestimated. We want to feel included without others showing us condescension. At the same time, no one wants to be overestimated. We want to feel challenged without others overwhelming us. We recognize that children can be frustrated or disengaged, but we often fail to see that their feelings and behaviors are caused by the same things that stir up these feelings in adults — flawed assumptions about their abilities and interests. What if kids are more capable cognitively than we think? What if we demand too much of them pragmatically? Nowadays, we simultaneously adultify children and infantalize them, depending on the situation. But what if we have those situations backwards? In The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups (Viking, 2016), Erika Christakis shares her insights gleaned from years working with young children as a parent, preschool teacher, and preschool director. Christakis joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work on her website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with her on Twitter at @ErikaChristakis. 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/public-policy

When adults today look back on their time as children, many of their memories may come from moments when they were engaged in free play with kids in their neighborhood — exploring creeks, riding bikes, and playing pick-up sports. Moments like these, occurring outside of adult-imposed structures, put children in a position to make decisions, take risks, and navigate social relationships. Now parents are much more likely to organize playdates on behalf of their children or push them into organized sports and summer camps. But do these interactions provide the same kinds of learning experiences? If parents value free play, what choice do they have? In Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood into a Place for Play (Free Play Press, 2012), Mike Lanza describes how individual families can establish hangout spaces for kids in order to foster self-reliance and joy for their children and build community with their neighbors. Lanza joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work on his website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @playborhood. 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/public-policy

How is the medical profession regulated in a ‘risk society’. This is the core question of John M. Chamberlain‘s Medical Regulation, Fitness to Practice and Revalidation: A Critical Introduction (Policy Press, 2015). Chamberlain, an associate professor of medical criminology at the University of Southampton, explores both the history of the medical profession as well as recent attempts to regulate and manage medicine’s relationship with society. The book focuses on how practitioners are judged to be fit, or not, to practice, in the context of both transformations of the profession and high profile scandals. The text brings together an analysis of the impact of new modes of regulation, particularly in terms of numbers of doctors sanctioned for poor practice, with theories of the sociology of professions and risk society. Focused on the UK, the book has important global implications and is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary medical practice, as well as those working on professions, risk and sociology more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Nadim Bakhshov joins the New Books in Network to discuss his book Against Capitalist Education: What is Education for? (Zero Books, 2015). The book posits new alternatives to educational thought and philosophy through an innovated, yet classic, style of dialogue between two characters, John and George, whom both channel philosophers, intellectuals, and great thinkers in history. You can connect to the guest via his Twitter at @nadimbakhshov or website, and also listen to his podcast on the subject here. For questions or comments on the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect to the host at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

El Sistema, the massive Venezuelan youth orchestra program, has been hailed in some quarters as the next big idea in music education (if not as the savior of classical music itself). Any who have found the press coverage of El Sistema suspiciously rosy, however, will find quite another account in Geoffrey Baker‘s engrossing and at times sharply critical book, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (Oxford University Press, 2014). Baker takes an ethnographic approach to El Sistema, investigating the daily lives and experiences of students and teachers, while simultaneously drawing on recent research in music pedagogy to subject the structure and history of the program to an ideological critique. El Sistema describes itself as an organization devoted to the “pedagogical, occupational, and ethical rescue” of children through orchestral music, dedicated to protecting and healing the most vulnerable ranks of Venezuelan society. To this, Baker raises troubling questions. Is it really the case that the average student in El Sistema comes from a precarious economic background? Supposing that musical training can foster social development, is the symphony orchestra, with its rigid hierarchies of command, really the best way to train model citizens? And in the long run, can Venezuela — or indeed, any country — provide long term employment for such a large cohort of professionally trained musicians? Further Listening/Viewing/Reading: Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra here. Lawrence Scripp’s interview with Luigi Mazzocchi: “The Need to Testify: A Venezuelan Musician’s Critique of El Sistema and his Call for Reform” (Full version here) (Shorter, journalistic version here) https://van-us.atavist.com/all-that-matters Geoffrey Baker’s El Sistema blog here. Special issue of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education on El Sistema here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Adam Seth Levine has written American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction (Princeton University Press, 2015). Levine teaches in the Department of Government at Cornell University. If we have learned anything about American politics over the last several months, it is that there are a lot of people who are angry about the present and fearful about the future. American Insecurity demonstrates why it is difficult to channel these sentiments into political action. Using a series of lab and field experiments, we learn in American Insecurity that those who feel economically insecure may be de-mobilized if reminded about their insecurity. There are numerous implications of Levine’s findings for how we understand the psychology of insecurity and the ways interest groups might hone mobilization strategies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The experience of the African American middle class has been an important area of research in the USA. However, the British experience has, by comparison, not been subject to the same amount of attention, particularly with regard to the middle class experience of education. Dr. Nicola Rollock, Deputy Director, Centre for Research in Race & Education and Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Education, along with her co-authors, explores this under researched area in The Colour of Class: The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes (Routledge, 2014). Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the idea of intersectionality, and Bourdieu, the book depicts the strategies associated with choosing schools, the narratives of families’ educational experiences, along with the legacy of racism within the British education system. The book is an important intervention into recent debates around educational attainment, charting the changing strategies, and changing perceptions, held by this section of middle class society. Ultimately despite so much attention given to other sociological categories, such as class or gender, when thinking about education race remains vitally important. This conclusion, alongside its wealth of empirical material and highly accessible style, make it essential reading.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

There is no shortage of talk about our public schools being broken. Some critics say we need to embrace a reform agenda that includes more standardized testing and a longer school day for students and performance pay and an end to tenure for teachers. Others respond that the effects of these measures are overstated or counterproductive and that the most sensible place to start is to dramatically increase funding for public schools in their current form. Whatever their positions or priorities, both sides in this debate are likely making the same key assumption — public schools are the best way to promote socio-economic mobility. This means that they still envision a lot of the same things, like an adult teaching a large group of children, who are approximately the same age, content that someone else has decided is important for them to learn. What if they instead accepted that other social programs would be a more effective means of achieving equity in our society? What if they believed that public education was a worthwhile endeavor, but that its true power was in its ability to facilitate creativity, critical thinking, civic participation, and self-direction? That would result in a much richer discussion with ideas that look completely different from the schools we recognize today. In Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Education Malpractice (Doubleday, 2016), Nikhil Goyal makes the case for completely rethinking our conception of school and its purpose and presents models we can look towards to take it in a radically new direction. Goyal joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work on his website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at@nikhilgoya_l. You can reach the host on Twitter at@tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy