School Board Battles

School Board Battles PDF Author: Melissa M. Deckman
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 9781589014091
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
If there is a "culture war" taking place in the United States, one of the most interesting, if under-the-radar, battlegrounds is in local school board elections. Rarely does the pitch of this battle reach national attention, as it did in Kansas when the state school board—led by several outspoken conservative Christians—voted to delete evolution from the state's science curriculum and its standardized tests in August 1999. That action rattled not only the educational and scientific communities, but concerned citizens around the nation as well. While the movement of the Christian Right into national and state politics has been well documented, this is the first book to examine their impact on local school board politics. While the Kansas decision was short-lived, during the past decade in school districts around the country, conservative Christian majorities have voted to place limits on sex education, to restrict library books, to remove references to gays and lesbians in the classroom, and to promote American culture as superior to other cultures. School Board Battles studies the motivation, strategies, and electoral success of Christian Right school board candidates. Based on interviews, and using an extensive national survey of candidates as well as case studies of two school districts in which conservative Christians ran and served on local boards, Melissa M. Deckman gives us a surprisingly complex picture of these candidates. She reveals weaker ties to national Christian Right organizations—and more similarities between these conservative candidates and their more secular counterparts than might be expected. Deckman examines important questions: Why do conservative Christians run for school boards? How much influence has the Christian Right actually had on school boards? How do conservative Christians govern? School Board Battles is an in-depth and in-the-trenches look at an important encounter in the "culture war"—one that may well determine the future of our nation's youth.

School Board Battles

School Board Battles PDF Author: Melissa M. Deckman
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 9781589014091
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
If there is a "culture war" taking place in the United States, one of the most interesting, if under-the-radar, battlegrounds is in local school board elections. Rarely does the pitch of this battle reach national attention, as it did in Kansas when the state school board—led by several outspoken conservative Christians—voted to delete evolution from the state's science curriculum and its standardized tests in August 1999. That action rattled not only the educational and scientific communities, but concerned citizens around the nation as well. While the movement of the Christian Right into national and state politics has been well documented, this is the first book to examine their impact on local school board politics. While the Kansas decision was short-lived, during the past decade in school districts around the country, conservative Christian majorities have voted to place limits on sex education, to restrict library books, to remove references to gays and lesbians in the classroom, and to promote American culture as superior to other cultures. School Board Battles studies the motivation, strategies, and electoral success of Christian Right school board candidates. Based on interviews, and using an extensive national survey of candidates as well as case studies of two school districts in which conservative Christians ran and served on local boards, Melissa M. Deckman gives us a surprisingly complex picture of these candidates. She reveals weaker ties to national Christian Right organizations—and more similarities between these conservative candidates and their more secular counterparts than might be expected. Deckman examines important questions: Why do conservative Christians run for school boards? How much influence has the Christian Right actually had on school boards? How do conservative Christians govern? School Board Battles is an in-depth and in-the-trenches look at an important encounter in the "culture war"—one that may well determine the future of our nation's youth.

The Battle Nearer to Home

The Battle Nearer to Home PDF Author: Christopher Bonastia
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503631982
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Despite its image as an epicenter of progressive social policy, New York City continues to have one of the nation's most segregated school systems. Tracing the quest for integration in education from the mid-1950s to the present, The Battle Nearer to Home follows the tireless efforts by educational activists to dismantle the deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities that segregation reinforces. The fight for integration has shifted significantly over time, not least in terms of the way "integration" is conceived, from transfers of students and redrawing school attendance zones, to more recent demands of community control of segregated schools. In all cases, the Board eventually pulled the plug in the face of resistance from more powerful stakeholders, and, starting in the 1970s, integration receded as a possible solution to educational inequality. In excavating the history of New York City school integration politics, in the halls of power and on the ground, Christopher Bonastia unearths the enduring white resistance to integration and the severe costs paid by Black and Latino students. This last decade has seen activists renew the fight for integration, but the war is still far from won.

Fighting to Save Our Urban Schools-- and Winning!

Fighting to Save Our Urban Schools-- and Winning! PDF Author: Donald R. McAdams
Publisher: Teachers College Press
ISBN: 9780807738849
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Don McAdams, one of a small group of activists elected to the Houston Independent School District Board of Education in 1989, provides a fast moving first-person account of successful reform in the nation’s seventh largest school district. With tact and wisdom, the author shows that school reform is seldom about reading, writing, and arithmetic. Rather, it is mostly about power, status, and money. This is a great story filled with conflict and surprising turns of fate. No one interested in politics, governance, and management of urban school districts can afford to miss Fighting to Save Our Urban Schools . . . and Winning!

Left Back

Left Back PDF Author: Diane Ravitch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743203267
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
In this authoritative history of American education reforms in this century, a distinguished scholar makes a compelling case that our schools fail when they consistently ignore their central purpose--teaching knowledge.

Whose America?

Whose America? PDF Author: Jonathan Zimmerman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674045446
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
What do America's children learn about American history, American values, and human decency? Who decides? In this absorbing book, Jonathan Zimmerman tells the dramatic story of conflict, compromise, and more conflict over the teaching of history and morality in twentieth-century America. In history, whose stories are told, and how? As Zimmerman reveals, multiculturalism began long ago. Starting in the 1920s, various immigrant groups--the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, even the newly arrived Eastern European Jews--urged school systems and textbook publishers to include their stories in the teaching of American history. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s brought similar criticism of the white version of American history, and in the end, textbooks and curricula have offered a more inclusive account of American progress in freedom and justice. But moral and religious education, Zimmerman argues, will remain on much thornier ground. In battles over school prayer or sex education, each side argues from such deeply held beliefs that they rarely understand one another's reasoning, let alone find a middle ground for compromise. Here there have been no resolutions to calm the teaching of history. All the same, Zimmerman argues, the strong American tradition of pluralism has softened the edges of the most rigorous moral and religious absolutism.

Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools

Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools PDF Author: Lydia G. Segal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674017542
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Exposes decades of rampant fraud, waste, and abuse in America's largest public school districts, analyzes how the widespread corruption has crippled schools and impeded learning, and offers a bold blueprint for reform.

The Hardest Deal of All

The Hardest Deal of All PDF Author: Charles C. Bolton
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604730609
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Race has shaped public education in the Magnolia State, from Reconstruction through the Carter Administration. For The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980 Charles C. Bolton mines newspaper accounts, interviews, journals, archival records, legal and financial documents, and other sources to uncover the complex story of one of Mississippi's most significant and vexing issues. This history closely examines specific events--the after-math of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the 1966 protests and counter-demonstrations in Grenada, and the efforts of particular organizations--and carefully considers the broader picture. Despite a separate but equal doctrine established in the late nineteenth century, the state's racially divided school systems quickly developed vast differences in terms of financing, academic resources, teacher salaries, and quality of education. As one of the nation's poorest states, Mississippi could not afford to finance one school system adequately, much less two. For much of the twentieth century, whites fought hard to preserve the dual school system, in which the maintenance of one-race schools became the most important measure of educational quality. Blacks fought equally hard to end segregated schooling, realizing that their schools would remain underfunded and understaffed as long as they were not integrated. Charles C. Bolton is professor and chair of history and co-director of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. He is the coauthor of Mississippi: An Illustrated History and coeditor of The Confessions of Edward Isham: A Poor White Life of the Old South . Bolton's work has also appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Journal of Mississippi History, and Mississippi Folklife .

The Schoolhouse Gate

The Schoolhouse Gate PDF Author: Justin Driver
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1101871660
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An award-winning constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago (who clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) gives us an engaging and alarming book that aims to vindicate the rights of public school stu­dents, which have so often been undermined by the Supreme Court in recent decades. Judicial decisions assessing the constitutional rights of students in the nation’s public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to un­authorized immigration, from antiwar protests to compul­sory flag salutes, from economic inequality to teacher-led prayer—these are but a few of the cultural anxieties dividing American society that the Supreme Court has addressed in elementary and secondary schools. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education and illuminates contemporary disputes that continue to fracture the nation. Justin Driver maintains that since the 1970s the Supreme Court has regularly abdicated its responsibility for protecting students’ constitutional rights and risked trans­forming public schools into Constitution-free zones. Students deriving lessons about citizenship from the Court’s decisions in recent decades would conclude that the following actions taken by educators pass constitutional muster: inflicting severe corporal punishment on students without any proce­dural protections, searching students and their possessions without probable cause in bids to uncover violations of school rules, random drug testing of students who are not suspected of wrongdoing, and suppressing student speech for the view­point it espouses. Taking their cue from such decisions, lower courts have upheld a wide array of dubious school actions, including degrading strip searches, repressive dress codes, draconian “zero tolerance” disciplinary policies, and severe restrictions on off-campus speech. Driver surveys this legal landscape with eloquence, highlights the gripping personal narratives behind landmark clashes, and warns that the repeated failure to honor students’ rights threatens our basic constitutional order. This magiste­rial book will make it impossible to view American schools—or America itself—in the same way again.

Lunch Wars

Lunch Wars PDF Author: Amy Kalafa
Publisher: Tarcher
ISBN: 9781585428625
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Citing formidable rates in American obesity and poor nutrition, the award-winning creator of the documentary Two Angry Moms shares empowering advice about how to campaign for healthier school lunches while working with administrations to promote better food programs. Original. 25,000 first printing.

This Day in June

This Day in June PDF Author: Gayle E. Pitman
Publisher: American Psychological Association
ISBN: 143381787X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description
A wildly whimsical, validating, and exuberant reflection of the LGBTQ+ community, This Day in June welcomes kids to experience a pride celebration and share in a day when we are all united. Includes a Reading Guide full of facts about LGBTQ+ history and culture and a Note to Parents and Caregivers on how to talk to children about sexual orientation.