Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change. Drawing on surveys on Americans' changing behavior over the past twenty-five years, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether the PTA, church, recreation clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. Our shrinking access to the "social capital" that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing is a serious threat to our civic and personal health. The loss of social capital is felt in critical ways : communities with less social capital have lower educational performance and more teen pregnancy, child suicide, low birth weight, and prenatal mortality. Social capital is also a strong predictor of crime rates, other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and health. America has faced this crisis before. At the turn of the last century, social capital was at low ebb, reduced by urbanization, industrialization, and vast immigration that uprooted Americans from their friends, social institutions, and families. Faced with this challenge, the country righted itself. Within a few decades, a range of organizations was created, from the Red Cross, Boy Scouts, and YWCA to Hadassah and the Knights of Columbus and the Urban League and social capital was rebuilt. Putnam calls on Americans to start the process again.

Award-winning author, public intellectual, and former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch critiques a lifetime's worth of school reforms and reveals the simple--yet difficult--truth about how we can create actual change in public schools.

The New York Times –bestselling author of Nudge examines the prevelance and burden of ‘sludge’—red tape and unnecessary paperwork—and why we must do better. “If nudges have a mortal enemy, or perhaps the equivalent of antimatter to matter, it’s ‘sludge’.” — Forbes We’ve all had to fight our way through administrative sludge—filling out complicated online forms, mailing in paperwork, standing in line at the motor vehicle registry. This kind of red tape is a nuisance, but, as Cass Sunstein shows in Sludge , it can also impair health, reduce growth, entrench poverty, and exacerbate inequality. Confronted by sludge, people just give up—and lose a promised outcome: a visa, a job, a permit, an educational opportunity, necessary medical help. In this lively and entertaining look at the terribleness of sludge, Sunstein explains what we can do to reduce it. Because of sludge, Sunstein, explains, too many people don't receive benefits to which they are entitled. Sludge even prevents many people from exercising their constitutional rights—when, for example, barriers to voting in an election are too high. (A Sludge Reduction Act would be a Voting Rights Act.) Sunstein takes readers on a tour of the not-so-wonderful world of sludge, describes justifications for certain kinds of sludge, and proposes “Sludge Audits” as a way to measure the effects of sludge. On balance, Sunstein argues, sludge infringes on human dignity, making people feel that their time and even their lives don't matter. We must do better.

Why we need to stop wasting public funds on education Despite being immensely popular—and immensely lucrative—education is grossly overrated. Now with a new afterword by Bryan Caplan, this explosive book argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As only to forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for average workers, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy. Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense— The Case against Education points the way.

Introduction : class, race, and gender in educational politics--Textual authority, culture, and the politics of literacy--Postmodernism and the discorse of educational criticism--Cultural politics, reading formations, and the role of teachers as public intellectuals--Border pedagogy in the age of postmodernism--The punishment of disciplines : cultural studies and the transformation of legitimate knowledge--Working-class displacements and postmodern representations--Conclusion : postmodernism as politics--Beyond difference as technological utopianism and cultural separatism.

"The cost of a college degree has increased by 1,125% since 1978 - four times the rate of inflation. Total student debt is $1.3 trillion. Many private universities charge tuitions ranging from $60-70,000 per year. Nearly 2/3 of all college students must borrow to study, and the average student graduates with more than $30,000 in debt. 53% of college graduates under 25 years old are unemployed or underemployed (working part-time or in low-paying jobs that do not require college degrees). Professors - remember them? - rarely teach undergraduates at many major universities. 76% of all university classes are taught by part-time, untenured faculty. In Fail U., Charles J. Sykes asks, "Is it worth it?" With chapters exploring the staggering costs of a college education, the sharp decline in tenured faculty and teaching loads, the explosion of administrator jobs, the grandiose building plans (gyms, food courts, student recreation centers), and the hysteria surrounding the "epidemic" of campus rapes, "triggers," "micro-aggressions," and other forms of alleged trauma, Fail U. concludes by offering a different vision of higher education; one that is affordable, more productive, and better-suited to meet the needs of a diverse range of students. Provocative, persuasive, clear-eyed, and even amusing, Fail U. strips the academic emperor of its clothes to reveal the American university system as it really is - and how it must change"--

From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and--because many have never been recorded--when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City , Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N'ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city's original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan ("the place where we get bows"), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish. A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America's doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York's colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of "killer languages" like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.

Product Description The question of culture has become central for a new generation of scholars raised in a world of television and mass production. At the same time debates about culture have become a point of reference for criticism of current trends in academia and society, variously defended or derided on the grounds of "multiculturalism," "canonicity," and political correctness." In his re-examination off these debates, Stanley Aronowitz traces the history of the cultural issue - in both its British and American manifestations - and relates it to the contemporary rethinking of the nature of knowledge and culture. Roll Over Beethoven analyzes topics as diverse as the history of American radicalism, the sociology if science, the impact of the Library of Congress on the organization of knowledge, and the institutionalization of film studies. Aronowitz's account of recent controversies over "political correctness" reveals that the current culture wars reflect profound differences among scholars over the proper role of the university and the character of legitimate intellectual knowledge. Within this broad reappraisal of the cultural question, which is embedded in the intellectual history of the 20th century, Aronowitz offers an "interpretive genealogy" of cultural studies that describes both the evolution of the field and the political and social contexts in which it developed. He argues that cultural studies exhibit a tendency toward transgression that is rarely explicit but always present and, at its best, not merely interdisciplinary but anti-disciplinary. From Publishers Weekly In this "interpretive genealogy of cultural studies," sociologist Aronowitz ( The Politics of Identity ) offers a history of this field with an eye toward examining how the nature of intellectual knowledge is defined. Though the book meanders from present-day politics to the historical debate over "high" and "low" culture to the role of the New Left in popular culture, Aronowitz's style is fairly accessible. Some arguments are undeveloped, as when he urges the Left to vigorously support the First Amendment but then suggests that "any community has a right to set limits on what it considers acceptable speech." In a chapter on the cultural politics of the Popular Front, Aronowitz offers an engaging memoir of his Bronx boyhood, recalling his rich encounters with classical and popular music and his study of political economy at a Communist Party school; he then analyzes novels and plays of the era, defending them against charges of populist oversimplification. After addressing current debates over the idea of an academic "canon," he notes that "virtually any significant educational innovation already has a history somewhere in the annals of the American academic system." Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Through his books on the labor movement, social theory, education theory, and the politics of science, Aronowitz has become one of the most interesting intellectuals on the contemporary scene. His latest work traces the emergence of "Cultural Studies" and emphasizes its invigorating impact on the humanities and social sciences. Written in an entertaining and informative style, Roll Over Beethoven could become the book that helps introduce large numbers of readers to the exciting new field of cultural interpretation. Individual chapters explore such topics as "high" versus "low" culture, culture and politics in the 1930s, the state of popular culture in contemporary America, and the relationship of cultural studies to the literary and philosophical canon. Along the way, Aronowitz offers a sophisticated critique of the revanchist critics of the modern university (Allan Bloom, William Bennett, et al.). This is a first-rate text that deserves the widest possible readership. - Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"The stagnation of living standards for most Americans over the past few decades has been the defining trend of modern life in the United States. Wealth and educational attainment have all slowed to a crawl in the twenty first century, while life expectancy has declined, economic inequality has soared, and the Black-White wage gap is as large as it was when Harry Truman was president. How did this happen in the world's most powerful country? Drawing from decades of writing about the economy for the New York Times, as well as years spent digging through archives, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Leonhardt tells the story of the past century of the American economy, starting with the Great Depression and the invention of the term "American dream." UNTITLED explains how the United States built the most prosperous mass economy in history after the Depression, then examines how that economy unraveled after our postwar boom. Its central argument is that three forces, above all, have dictated the economy's rise and fall: political power through grass-roots movement, culture, and investment in making life better for the future. Filled with the clear, lucid writing for which Leonhardt is known, UNTITLED is an enlightening economic history, featuring the unforgettable figures who helped shape the American dream: Frances Perkins, Eisenhower, Cesar Chavez, Betty Friedan, Robert Kennedy, Grace Hopper, Paul Hoffman, and more"--

"Standing on the foundations of America's promise of equal opportunity, our universities purport to "serve as engines of social mobility" and "practitioners of democracy." But as acclaimed scholar and pioneering civil rights advocate Lani Guinier argues, the merit systems that dictate the admissions practices of these institutions are functioning to select and privilege elite individuals rather than create learning communities geared to advance democratic societies. Having studied and taught at schools such as Harvard University, Yale Law School, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Guinier has spent years examining the experiences of ethnic minorities at the nation's top institutions of higher education, and here she lays bare the practices that impede the stated missions of these schools. Guinier argues for reformation, not only of the very premises of admissions practices but of the shape of higher education itself, and she offers many examples of new collaborative initiatives that prepare students for engaged citizenship in our increasingly multicultural society"--

Cultural differences are not asserted through the specificity of dominant notions of race, gender, and class, but through a commitment to expanding dialogue and exchange across cultural lines as part of a wider attempt to deepen and develop democratic public life. This revised edition of the 1985 best-seller speaks eloquently to the need to attend to ever-present inequalities of education in the light of new political correctness, technology, and curricula.

The most widely debated conception of democracy in recent years is deliberative democracy--the idea that citizens or their representatives owe each other mutually acceptable reasons for the laws they enact. Two prominent voices in the ongoing discussion are Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. In Why Deliberative Democracy? , they move the debate forward beyond their influential book, Democracy and Disagreement . What exactly is deliberative democracy? Why is it more defensible than its rivals? By offering clear answers to these timely questions, Gutmann and Thompson illuminate the theory and practice of justifying public policies in contemporary democracies. They not only develop their theory of deliberative democracy in new directions but also apply it to new practical problems. They discuss bioethics, health care, truth commissions, educational policy, and decisions to declare war. In "What Deliberative Democracy Means," which opens this collection of essays, they provide the most accessible exposition of deliberative democracy to date. They show how deliberative democracy should play an important role even in the debates about military intervention abroad. Why Deliberative Democracy? contributes to our understanding of how democratic citizens and their representatives can make justifiable decisions for their society in the face of the fundamental disagreements that are inevitable in diverse societies. Gutmann and Thompson provide a balanced and fair-minded approach that will benefit anyone intent on giving reason and reciprocity a more prominent place in politics than power and special interests.

We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust. Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want. In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment. Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created.

Following on from Noam Chomsky's bestselling September 11 , this hard-hitting book presents the most up-to-date thinking on war, terrorism and the new global order by one of America's most articulate historians and a high profile defender of civil rights.

Written by one of this country’s leading experts on American Judaism, this book offers a snapshot of Orthodoxy Jewry in the United States, asking how the community has evolved in the years since World War II and where it is headed in the future. Incorporating rich details of everyday life, fine-grained observations of cultural practices, descriptions of educational institutions, and more, Samuel Heilman delineates the varieties of Jewish Orthodox groups, focusing in particular on the contest between the proudly parochial, contra-acculturative haredi Orthodoxy and the accomodationist modern Orthodoxy over the future of this religious community. What emerges overall is a picture of an Orthodox Jewry that has gained both in numbers and intensity and that has moved farther to the religious right as it struggles to define itself and to maintain age-old traditions in the midst of modernity, secularization, technological advances, and the pervasiveness of contemporary American culture.

Chronicles the history of the Educational Testing Service and discusses how it was created, why researchers believed it would help create a new class of intelligent Americans, how the plan backfired, and how it affected American history.

Signed into law in 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) promised to revolutionize American public education. Originally supported by a bipartisan coalition, it purports to improve public schools by enforcing a system of standards and accountability through high-stakes testing. Many people supported it originally, despite doubts, because of its promise especially to improve the way schools serve poor children. By making federal funding contingent on accepting a system of tests and sanctions, it is radically affecting the life of schools around the country. But, argue the authors of this citizen's guide to the most important political issue in education, far from improving public schools and increasing the ability of the system to serve poor and minority children, the law is doing exactly the opposite. Here some of our most prominent, respected voices in education-including school innovator Deborah Meier, education activist Alfie Kohn, and founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools Theodore R. Sizer-come together to show us how, point by point, NCLB undermines the things it claims to improve: * How NCLB punishes rather than helps poor and minority kids and their schools * How NCLB helps further an agenda of privatization and an attack on public schools * How the focus on testing and test preparation dumbs down classrooms * And they put forward a richly articulated vision of alternatives. Educators and parents around the country are feeling the harshly counterproductive effects of NCLB. This book is an essential guide to understanding what's wrong and where we should go from here.

The jigsaw classroom is a cooperative learning technique with a three-decade track record of successfully reducing racial conflict and increasing positive educational outcomes. Not only does it open the door to warmer, closer friendships within and across ethnic boundaries, it has also proved effective at raising the self-esteem of students while improving their performance and increasing their liking for school and their enthusiasm about learning. The jigsaw technique was first developed in the early 1970s by psychologist Elliot Aronson and his students at the University of Texas and the University of California. Since then, hundreds of schools have used the jigsaw classroom with great success. With a new foreword by Joshua Aronson.

This book is both a powerful personal memoir and the definitive history of an organization that helped change American society. Jack Greenberg was a key figure at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) for some thirty-five years. Most of the cases we associate from that period--school integration, equal employment, fair housing, voter registration--were LDF cases, either argued by Greenberg himself or litigated under his direction. Greenberg represented Martin Luther King, Jr., in Birmingham and won for him the right to march from Selma to Montgomery. Under Greenberg's leadership, the LDF forced the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith and integrated the University of Alabama when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. Greenberg won the cases in which the Supreme Court repudiated the "all deliberate speed" doctrine, which had made school desegregation intolerably slow. Through the 1970s and 1980s, LDF tackled most of the important cases that enforced the new civil rights legislation of the 1960s involving public accommodations, employment, education, and health care, and started the campaigns for prisoners' rights and against capital punishment. More than a history of the litigation that made the LDF so important, the book offers unique insights into its strategies, courtroom techniques, values, and personal relationships. Filled with stories only Greenberg could tell of his experiences with Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Lani Guinier, Roy Wilkins, Vernon Jordan, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Lyndon Johnson, and scores of others, Crusaders in the Courts is an epic saga of a critical period in American history as well as the poignant personal story of the evolution of a white Jewish lawyer into a major civil rights advocate.