Description
Book SynopsisIn Assault on Kids and Teachers, educators from across the United States push back against the neoliberal school reform movements that are taking the public out of public education, demonizing teachers, and stealing from youth the opportunity for an equitable, just, and holistic education. Contributors, including teachers, educational and community activists, teacher educators, critical education scholars, and others, expose how racism, economic injustice, and other forms of injustice are created and recreated both locally and nationally through educational policies more intent on turning schools into profit centers and undermining teacher unions than on strengthening public schools. Topics include the privatization of public schools, the growing influence of grit ideology on school practices, zero tolerance policies and the school-to-prison pipeline, Teach For America, the lies behind the charter school movement, and the damage TPAs are doing to teacher education. Beyond l
Trade Review
“So-called ‘solutions’ for improving public education interconnect in troubling ways—as is revealed insightfully and compellingly in this new and timely book. Ahlquist, Gorski, and Montaño have assembled an impressive collection of analyses that help us to unmask what are mere symptoms of broader movements to widen educational disparities, and to imagine alternatives and interventions with insight and conviction. Assault on Kids and Teachers should cause us to pause, and reimagine, and should be read immediately.”—Kevin Kumashiro, Author, The Seduction of Common Sense: How the Right Has Framed the Debate on America’s Schools; President-Elect, National Association for Multicultural Education
“Corporate education reformers have come for public education, punishing us with high-stakes testing, attacking teachers and communities, and profiteering through charter schools and other free market models. Assault on Kids and Teachers give us tools to not only fight back against this corporate juggernaut, but also the vision to look forward with hope and the power to make things better. A critically important book that could not have come at a better time, Assault on Kids and Teachers should be read by anyone interested in the struggle over the soul of schooling and educational democracy in the United States.”—Wayne Au, Editor, Rethinking Schools; Professor, School of Educational Studies, University of Washington Bothell
Table of Contents
List of Tables – Joyce E. King: Foreword – Introduction – Roberta Ahlquist: The "Empire" Strikes Back with a Neoliberal Agenda: Confronting the Legacies of Colonialism and Popular Resistance – Monique Redeaux-Smith: "Won’t Back Down, Don’t Know How": The Fight for Walter H. Dyett High School – Richard D. Lakes/Lisa Healey/Paul McLennan/Susan McWethy/Jennifer Sauer/Mary Anne Smith: Exposing the Myths of Privatization: Popular Education and Political Activism in a Southern U.S. City – Carolyne J. White/Leah Z. Owens: "Getting Up" and Claiming Political Power in Newark: Citizens Taking Action for Radically Democratic Possibilities – Paul C. Gorski: Poverty Ideologies and the Possibility of Equitable Education: How Deficit, Grit, and Structural Views Enable or Inhibit Just Policy and Practice for Economically Marginalized Students – Alan Singer/Eustace Thompson: Battling Zero-Tolerance in Schools and the School-to-Prison Pipeline – Theresa Montaño/Maria Elena Cruz: Educate, Agitate and Organize: One Union’s Response to the Teacher Shortage and Union Bashing – Virginia Lea: Re-Routing the Nightmare: Why We Need Another Movement to Create an Equitable Public Education System in Wisconsin and Across the United States – Julie Gorlewski/Peter M. Taubman: From Despair to Hope: reClaiming Education – Julian Vasquez Heilig/T. Jameson Brewer/Terrenda White: What Instead?: Reframing the Debate About Charter Schools, Teach For America, and High-Stakes Testing – Erica K. Dotson/Alison G. Dover/Nick Henning/Ruchi Agarw al-Rangnath: They Should See Themselves as Powerful: Teacher Educators, Agency, and Resisting TPAs – Contributors.
