This book offers a prescription for reform that includes freedom of choice among public and private schools.

Education as Freedom is a groundbreaking edited text that documents and reexamines African-American empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to knowledge-making, teaching, and learning and American education from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, a dynamic period of African-American educational thought and activism. Education as Freedom is a long awaited text that historicizes the current racial achievement gap as well as illuminates the myriad of African American voices and actions to define the purpose of education and to push the limits of the democratic experiment in the United States.

A radical educator's paradigm-shifting inquiry into the accepted, normal demands of school, as illuminated by moving portraits of four young "problem children" In this dazzling debut, Carla Shalaby, a former elementary school teacher, explores the everyday lives of four young "troublemakers," challenging the ways we identify and understand so-called problem children. Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children—Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem. From Zora's proud individuality to Marcus's open willfulness, from Sean's struggle with authority to Lucas's tenacious imagination, comes profound insight—for educators and parents alike—into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age. Shalaby's empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands—despite good intentions—work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.

Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists. Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

Now a National Bestseller! From coronavirus lockdowns to critical race theory in the classroom, it has become crystal clear that America’s schools aren’t working for America’s students and parents. No one knows this better than Betsy DeVos. Long before she was tapped by President Trump to serve as secretary of education, DeVos established herself as one of the country’s most influential advocates for education reform, from school choice and charter schools to protecting free speech on campus. She’s unflinching in standing up to the powerful interests who control and benefit from the status quo in education – which is why the unions, the media, and the radical left made her public enemy number one. Now, DeVos is ready to tell her side of the story after years of being vilified by the radical left for championing common-sense, conservative reforms in America’s schools. In Hostages No More, DeVos unleashes her candid thoughts about working in the Trump administration, recounts her battles over the decades to put students first, hits back at “woke” curricula in our schools, and details the reforms America must pursue to fix its long and badly broken education system. And she has stories to tell: DeVos offers blunt insights on the people and politics that stand in the way of fixing our schools. For students, families and concerned citizens, DeVos shares a roadmap for reclaiming education and securing the futures of our kids – and America.

In Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment, Denise Schaeffer challenges the common view of Rousseau as primarily concerned with conditioning citizens’ passions in order to promote republican virtue and unreflective patriotism. Schaeffer argues that, to the contrary, Rousseau’s central concern is the problem of judgment and how to foster it on both the individual and political level in order to create the conditions for genuine self-rule. Offering a detailed commentary on Rousseau’s major work on education, Emile, and a wide-ranging analysis of the relationship between Emile and several of Rousseau’s other works, Schaeffer explores Rousseau’s understanding of what good judgment is, how it is learned, and why it is central to the achievement and preservation of human freedom. The model of Rousseauian citizenship that emerges from Schaeffer’s analysis is more dynamic and self-critical than is often recognized. This book demonstrates the importance of Rousseau’s contribution to our understanding of the faculty of judgment, and, more broadly, invites a critical reevaluation of Rousseau’s understanding of education, citizenship, and both individual and collective freedom.