Browse

By traveling through daily life at the school, A Curriculum of Fear investigates how students and school staff made sense of, negotiated, and contested the intense focus on national security, terrorism, and their militarized responsibilities to the nation. Drawing from critical scholarship on school militarization, neoliberal school reform, the impact of the global war on terror on everyday life in the U.S., and the political uses of fear, this book maps the social, political, and economic contexts that gave rise to the school’s Homeland Security program and its popularity. Ultimately, as the first ethnography of a high school Homeland Security program, this book traces how Milton was not only “under siege”—shaped by the new normal imposed by the global war on terror—it actively prepared for the siege itself.

First Strike is an ambitious project that utilizes a multi-method approach to gain insight into the confluence between public education and prison. It takes an unique perspective and delves into the root causes of an ever-expansive prison system and disastrous educational policy. First Strike intervenes in a spirited public discussion on the relation of education policies and budgets, the rise of mass incarceration and permutations of racism. Policy makers, school districts and local governments have long known that there is a relationship between high incarceration rates and school failure. First Strike is the first book that demonstrates how and why that connection exists and shows in what ways school districts, cities and states have been complicit and can reverse a disturbing and needless trend.

In 2008, The College Preparatory Academy, a traditional public high school in New York City, created its own in-house nonprofit organization in order to solicit donations from the private sector, most notably, an elite corporate firm in Midtown Manhattan. College Prep’s student body is primarily Black and Latino, while teachers are predominantly White. Approximately 78% of the student body is eligible for free-or reduced-price lunch. From the perspectives of many who are passionate about education, equity and justice, the creation of the school’s nonprofit seemed like a brilliant move in the context of an educational landscape known for entrenched and systemic inequalities. In the interest of “leveling the playing field”, many ask, why not take advantage of the generosity of funders who wish to make a difference through their gifts? While at first glance, the school’s successful marketing seems to lead to greater resources for its students, Brown demonstrates the drawbacks of a “political spectacle” in an education marketplace where charity masquerades as justice. Based on two years of qualitative teacher-research at the “College Preparatory Academy”, Brown’s critical ethnography foregrounds the voices of students, teachers and parents as she connects corporate philanthropic involvement with the maintenance of race, class and gender inequalities. The work calls into question the viability of private sector involvement as a means for the attainment of educational justice or social equity and in fact, asserts that models of corporate or philanthropic charity in education ironically reify the race and class hierarchies they purport to alleviate.

At colleges and universities throughout the United States, political protest and intellectual dissent are increasingly being met with repressive tactics by administrators, politicians, and the police—from the use of SWAT teams to disperse student protestors and the profiling of Muslim and Arab American students to the denial of tenure and dismissal of politically engaged faculty. This book explores the policing of knowledge by explicitly linking the academy to the broader politics of militarism, racism, nationalism, and neoliberalism that define the contemporary imperial state. This book argues that “academic freedom” is not a sufficient response to the crisis of intellectual repression. Instead, it contends that battles fought over academic containment must be understood in light of the academy’s relationship to U.S. expansionism and global capital. Based on multidisciplinary research, autobiographical accounts, and even performance scripts, this analysis offers insights into such varied manifestations of “the imperial university” as CIA recruitment at black and Latino colleges, the connections between universities and civilian and military prisons, and the gender and sexual politics of academic repression.

Inheriting Possibility is concerned with the ways we have come to understand and produce knowledge about the reproduction of power relations and how those understandings have rested on a premise that nature is made of fixed universals that create the stage for the play of culture. It is said that “truth” exists in nature and that culture contaminates our access to these “truths.” It is argued that this same dualism underpins theories and research on inheritance, social reproduction, and human learning and development. Given work in the physical and biological sciences and new materialist philosophy, it is not only argued that nature is culture but also that the assumed nature/culture binary has ultimately limited our understanding of how power relations are reproduced. Thus, Inheriting Possibility develops new arguments about the forces of inheritance (i.e., the double injunction and intra-action of material-discursive forces, timespace, and assemblages) and rethinks approaches to quantitative inquiry on social reproduction in education. Inheriting Possibility delineates how the limitations of knowledge production have been due to the false assumptions about the possibilities of unlocking nature’s “truths” with quantification. It puts forward an alternative ontology, epistemology, and methodology that attempt to carve out a space within critical inquiry for quantitative methods. Inheriting Possibility empirically demonstrates how parenting practices and grandchild SAT performance are both results of myriad forces that are multigenerational, events, and material phenomena that cannot be reduced to pathology or deficiency but rather convey the inheritance of reconfiguring and enfolding historialities of differential patterns of possibility.

Simple in concept, far-reaching in implementation, Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) was developed in the 1980s as an efficient way to assess the progress of struggling students, including those with disabilities. Today, there are few areas of special education policy and practice that have not been influenced by CBM progress monitoring. The impact of CBM is reflected in recent education reforms that emphasize improvements in assessment and data-based decision making. This book provides a solid picture of the past, present, and possible future of CBM progress monitoring. This book presents a nuanced examination of CBM progress monitoring in reading, math, and content-area learning to assess students at all levels, from early childhood to secondary school, and with a wide range of abilities, from high- and low-incidence disabilities to no disabilities. This study also evaluates how the approach has affected instructional practices, teacher training, psychology and school psychology, educational policy, and research in the United States and beyond.

Since the 1980s, strategies for improving public education in America have focused on either competition through voucher programs and charter schools or standardization as enacted into federal law through No Child Left Behind. These reforms, however, have failed to narrow the performance gap between poor urban students and other children. In response, parents have begun to organize local campaigns to strengthen the public schools in their communities. One of the most original, successful, and influential of these parent-led campaigns has been the Community Collaborative to Improve District 9 (CC9), a consortium of six neighborhood-based groups in the Bronx. This book tells the story of CC9 from its origins in 1995 as a small group of concerned parents to the citywide application of its reform agenda—concentrating on targeted investment in the development of teacher capacity—ten years later. Drawing on in-depth interviews with participants, analysis of qualitative data, and access to meetings and archives, the book evaluates CC9’s innovative approach to organizing and collaboration with other stakeholders, including the United Federation of Teachers, the NYC Department of Education, neighborhood nonprofits, and city colleges and universities. Situating this case within a wider exploration of parent participation in educational reform, the book explains why CC9 succeeded and other parent-led movements did not. It also examines the ways in which the movement effectively empowered parents by rigorously ensuring a democratic process in making decisions and, more broadly, an inclusive organizational culture.

As zero-tolerance discipline policies have been instituted at high schools across the country, police officers are employed with increasing frequency to enforce behavior codes and maintain order, primarily at poorly performing, racially segregated urban schools. Actions that may once have sent students to the detention hall or resulted in their suspension may now introduce them to the criminal justice system. This book explores the impact of policing and punitive disciplinary policies on the students and their educational experience. Through in-depth interviews with and observations of students, teachers, administrators, and police officers, this book offers an interesting account of daily life at a Bronx high school where police patrol the hallways and security and discipline fall under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. It documents how, as law enforcement officials initiate confrontations with students, small infractions often escalate into “police matters” that can lead to summonses to criminal court, arrest, and confinement in juvenile detention centers. The book follows students from the classroom and the cafeteria to the detention hall, the dean’s office, and the criminal court system, clarifying the increasingly intimate relations between the school and the criminal justice system. Placing this trend within the context of recent social and economic changes, as well as developments within criminal justice and urban school reform, it shows how this police presence has created a culture of control in which penal management overshadows educational innovation.

In the 1960s and 1970s, minority and women students at colleges and universities across the United States organized protest movements to end racial and gender inequality on campus. African American, Chicano, Asian American, American Indian, women, and gay and lesbian activists demanded the creation of departments that reflected their histories and experiences, resulting in the formation of interdisciplinary studies programs that hoped to transform both the university and the wider society beyond the campus. This book traces and assesses the ways in which the rise of interdisciplines—departments of race, gender, and ethnicity; fields such as queer studies—were not simply a challenge to contemporary power as manifest in academia, the state, and global capitalism but were, rather, constitutive of it. The book delineates precisely how minority culture and difference as affirmed by legacies of the student movements were appropriated and institutionalized by established networks of power. Critically examining liberationist social movements and the cultural products that have been informed by them, including works by Adrian Piper, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith, this book argues for the need to recognize the vulnerabilities of cultural studies to co-option by state power and to develop modes of debate and analysis that may be in the institution but are, unequivocally, not of it.

Sovereign pedagogies provides an ethnographic study of Hālau Kū Māna, a public charter school that makes ʻŌiwi Hawaiʻi (Indigenous Hawaiian) culture its educational foundation. I chart connections between the work of teachers and students at this school with broader Hawaiian social struggles for cultural persistence and political power. Under a settler state system made possible through the seizure of Hawaiian national lands and institutions a century earlier, 21^st century Hawaiian charter school operators articulate pedagogies of survivance and self-determination while limited by contemporary structures of settler colonialism, such as the No Child Left Behind law. What struggles emerge when teaching Indigenous cultural knowledges within institutions built to marginalize and displace them? What educational possibilities are produced when teachers and students try to reside in and learn from these tensions rather than ignoring or attempting to transcend them? How do an Indigenous people use schooling to maintain and transform a collective sense of purpose and interconnection—of nationhood—in the face of forces of imperialism and settler colonialism? What roles do identity, race, gender and place play in these processes? This book shows the ways the provisions of the NCLB law have significantly limited the transformative power of Indigenous educational initiatives. As a reassimilative and disciplining force, NCLB perpetuates ongoing settler colonial logics of elimination and containment. I illustrate why the construction and maintenance of Indigenous educational enclaves within settler colonial structures is insufficient to changing persistent historical injustices.

Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education is a study of the educational breakdowns, conflicts and controversies that emerge as sexuality circulates through the spaces and relations of schooling. I focus specifically on LGBTQ issues and argue that welcoming LGBTQ students, families, teachers and issues into education requires us to rethink our theories of sexuality. Beginning with the contradiction that sexuality poses both a limit and an incitement to education, I turn to psychoanalysis and queer theory to ask: how does sexuality come to bear on teaching and learning? Since sexuality fuels the love, curiosity and aggression that make up our engagements with knowledge, there can be no education without it; and yet education, in its practices, rules and in the relations that comprise schooling, is threatened by the wildness of sexuality. While sexuality pushes education to its limit, education must attempt to limit sexuality. Opening each chapter with a moment of conflict drawn from contemporary public debates on the strange workings of sexuality in schools–from efforts to censor LGBTQ literature from elementary schools to concerns over the bullying of LGBTQ youth to debates about the content of sexuality education–I explore the charged emotional and theoretical terrain underscoring these concerns. Engaging representations from fiction, film, the news, and my own experiences of these conflicts in teacher education, Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education is less interested in settling meaning on an impossible subject than in re-envisioning the grounds for thinking about sexuality and education.

Marking the culmination of a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort that began with a 2010 workshop at the University of Ottawa, Worlds of Autism: Across the Spectrum of Neurological Difference features contributors from Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Brazil, Australia, and France. The work brings together a range of perspectives by uniting researchers who are concerned, to a greater or lesser degree, with autistic subjectivities and the politics of cognitive difference. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a project of this scope – in both methodological and conceptual terms – has been carried out in critical autism studies. As such, we have every reason to expect that the text will help to establish a clear direction for future research in this field. Theoretically framed and empirically informed, this work is divided into four main sections: (1) Approaching Autism, (2) Researching the Politics and Practice of Care, (3) Diagnosis and Difference in Autism, and (4) Cultural Productions and Representations of Autism. The volume serves to challenge the deficit model of autism, which is prevalent in literature that advocates a “cure” for neurodevelopmental difference. By contrast, this work contributes to a growing body of research that uses an abilities model to reframe autism as a complex, relational (dis)order that challenges stereotypes of what has long been regarded as “normal” human experience.