"A guide to the core issues driving the education wars, offering essential information about issues, actors, and potential outcomes."--

Drawing on nearly three decades in education--from his mother's after-school program on Chicago's South Side to his tenure as Secretary of Education in DC--How Schools Work follows Arne (as he insists you call him) as he takes on challenges at every turn: gangbangers in Chicago housing projects, parents who call him racist, teachers who insist they can't help poor kids, unions that refuse to modernize, Tea Partiers who call him an autocrat, affluent...

Innovation expert Ted Dintersmith took a trip across America, visiting all fifty states in a single school year. He originally set out to raise awareness about the urgent need to reimagine education to prepare students for a world marked by innovation -- but America's teachers one-upped him. All across the country, he met teachers in ordinary settings doing extraordinary things, creating innovative classrooms where children learn deeply and joyously...

"Co-Winner of the 2005 Gladys M. Kammerer Award, American Political Science Association" Charles T. Clotfelter is Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics and Law at Duke University. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His books include Buying the Best: Cost Escalation in Elite Higher Education (Princeton). The United States Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decision, Brown v. Board...

Amy Gutmann is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor and founding director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Her books include Freedom of Association and, with Anthony Appiah, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (both books available from Princeton) and, with Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement. A groundbreaking classic that lays out and defends a democratic theory of education Who should...

An era of sweeping cultural change in America, the postwar years saw the rise of beatniks and hippies, the birth of feminism, and the release of the first video game. It was also the era of new math. Introduced to US schools in the late 1950s and 1960s, the new math was a curricular answer to Cold War fears of American intellectual inadequacy. In the age of Sputnik and increasingly sophisticated technological systems and machines, math class came...

"Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush agreed on little, but united behind the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Passed in late 2001, it was hailed as a dramatic new departure in school reform. It would make the states set high standards, measure student progress, and hold failing schools accountable. A decade later, NCLB has been repudiated on both sides of the aisle. According to Jal Mehta, we should have seen it coming. Far from new, it was the same approach...