Ghetto Schooling

Argues that without fundamental change in government and business policies and restoring political power and economic opportunities to inner-city residents and the redirection of major resources back into the schools and the communities they serve, urban schools are consigned to failure, and no effort at raising standards, improving teaching, or boosting achievement can occur.

In this disturbing but ultimately hopeful personal account, Jean Anyon provides compelling evidence that the economic and political devastation of America's inner cities has robbed schools and teachers of the capacity to successfully implement current strategies of educational reform. She argues that without fundamental change in government and business policies and the redirection of major resources back into the schools and the communities they serve, urban schools are consigned to failure, and no effort at raising standards, improving teaching, or boosting achievement can occur. Based on her participation in an intensive four-year school reform project in the Newark, New Jersey public schools, the author vividly captures the anguish and anger of students and teachers caught in the tangle of a failing school system. Ghetto Schooling offers a penetrating historical analysis of more than a century of government and business policies that have drained the economic, political, and human resources of urban populations. Provocative and controversial, this book reveals the historical roots of the current crisis in ghetto schools and what must be done to reverse the downward spiral.

Describes how the ghetto separates Blacks not only from white people, but also from opportunities and resources.

This book examines historical approaches and current research and practice related to the education of adolescents placed at risk of school failure as a result of social and economic conditions. One major goal is to expand the intellectual exchange among researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and concerned citizens on factors influencing the achievement of poor and minority youth, specifically students in middle and high schools. Another is to encourage increased dialogue about policies and practices that can make a difference in educational opportunities and outcomes for these students. Although the chapters in this volume are not exhaustive, they represent an array of theoretical and methodological approaches that provide readers with new and diverse ways to think about issues of educational equality and opportunity in the United States. A premise that runs through each chapter is that school success is possible for poor and minority adolescents if adequate support from the school, family, and community is available. *The conceptual approach (Section I) places the research and practice on students placed at risk in a historical context and sets the stage for an important reframing of current definitions, research, policies, and practices aimed at this population. *Multiple research methodologies (Sections II and III) allow for comparisons across racial and ethnic groups as well as within groups, and contribute to different and complementary insights. Section III, "Focus on African-American Students," specifically addresses gender and social class differences among African-American adolescents. *Current reform strategies presently being implemented in schools throughout the United States are presented and discussed (Part IV). These strategies or programs highlight how schools, families, and communities can apply research findings like the ones this book presents, thus bridging the often wide gap between social science research and educational practice.

Illuminates tensions and transformations in today's Germany by examining literary, filmic, and musical treatments of the ghetto metaphor. Accounts of how Germany has changed since unification often portray the Berlin Republic as a new Germany that has left the Nazi past and Cold War division behind and entered the new millennium as a peaceful, worldly, and cautiously proud nation. Closer inspection, however, reveals tensions between such views and the realities of a country that continues to struggle with racism, provincialism, and fear of the perceived Other. Mainstream media foster such fears by describing violence in ghetto schools, failed integration, and the loss of society's core values. The city emerges as a key site not only of ethnic and political tension but of social change. Maria Stehle illuminates these tensions and transformations by following the metaphor of the ghetto in literary works from the 1990s by Feridun Zaimoglu, in German ghettocentric films from the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century, and in hip-hop and rap music of the same periods. In their representations of ghettos, authors, filmmakers, musicians, and performers redefine and challenge provincialism and nationalism and employ transcultural frameworks for their diverging political agendas. By contextualizing these discussions within social and political developments, this study illuminates the complexities that define Germany today for scholars and students across the disciplines of German, European, cultural, urban, and media studies. Maria Stehle is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

What is a charter school? Where do they come from? Who promotes them, and why? What are they supposed to do? Are they the silver bullet to the ills plaguing the American public education system? This book provides a comprehensive and accessible overview and analysis of charter schools and their many dimensions. It shows that charter schools as a whole lower the quality of education through the privatization and marketization of education. The final chapter provides readers with a way toward rethinking and remaking education in a way that is consistent with modern requirements. Society and its members need a fully funded high quality public education system open to all and controlled by a public authority.

The authors in this book use the metaphors of invisibility and visibility to explore the social and school lives of many children and young people in North America whose complexity, strengths, and vulnerabilities are largely unseen in the society and its schools. These “invisible children” are socially devalued in the sense that alleviating the difficult conditions of their lives is not a priority—children who are subjected to derogatory stereotypes, who are educationally neglected in schools that respond inadequately if at all to their needs, and who receive relatively little attention from scholars in the field of education or writers in the popular press. The chapter authors, some of the most passionate and insightful scholars in the field of education today, detail oversights and assaults, visible and invisible, but also affirm the capacity of many of these young people to survive, flourish, and often educate others, despite the painful and even desperate circumstances of their lives. By sharing their voices, providing basic information about them, and offering thoughtful analysis of their social situation, this volume combines education and advocacy in an accessible volume responsive to some of the most pressing issues of our time. Although their research methodologies differ, all of the contributors aim to get the facts straight and to set them in a meaningful context. New in the Third Edition: Chapters retained from the previous edition have been thoroughly revised and updated, and five totally new chapters have been added on the topics of: *young people pushed into the “school-to-prison” pipeline; *the “environmental landscape” of two out-of-school Mexican migrant teens in the rural Midwest; *the perceptions and practices, in and outside schools, that construct African American boys as school failures; *negative portrayals of blackness in the context of understanding the “collateral damage of continued white privilege”; and *working-class pregnant and parenting teens’ efforts to create positive identities for themselves. Of interest to a broad range of researchers, students, and practitioners across the field of education, this compelling book is accessible to all readers. It is particularly appropriate as a text for courses that address the social context of education, cultural and political change, and public policy, including social foundations of education, sociology of education, multicultural education, curriculum studies, and educational policy.