Education policy: Recent print books
This is a guide for those starting research on education policy and the impact of the state upon education.
Recent print books
Going the distance: the teaching profession in a post-COVID world by Lora Bartlett; Alisun Thompson; Judith Warren Little; Riley Collins
Publication Date: 2025In Going the Distance, Lora Bartlett, Alisun Thompson, Judith Warren Little, and Riley Collins examine the professional conditions that support career commitment among K-12 educators--and the factors that threaten teacher retention. Drawing insight from the period of significant teacher turnover and burnout both during and beyond COVID-19 school shutdowns in the United States, the authors offer clear guidance for policies and practices that meet the needs of teachers and nourish a robust teaching workforce.Essentials of education policy: processes and possibilities for educational leaders by William Ewell
Publication Date: 2025Essentials of Education Policy improves students' and educational leaders' understanding of the complex education policy system in the U.S. Through an applied pedagogical approach that connects analytical concepts from public policy and education research to professional practice, the book offers academic content and applications for elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education leaders.Raised to obey: the rise and spread of mass education by Agustina Paglayan
Publication Date: 2024Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In Raised to Obey, Agustina Paglayan offers an unsettling answer. The introduction of broadly accessible primary education was not mainly a response to industrialization, or fueled by democratic ideals, or even aimed at eradicating illiteracy or improving skills. It was motivated instead by elites' fear of the masses--and the desire to turn the "savage," "unruly," and "morally flawed" children of the lower classes into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws.Organizational betrayal: how schools enable sexual misconduct and how to stop it by Charol Shakeshaft
Publication Date: 2025In Organizational Betrayal, educational researcher Charol Shakeshaft advocates a system-wide approach for safeguarding K-12 students against educator sexual misconduct. She shows that practical interventions such as simply asking questions can advance the safety of children. Based on decades of inquiry into cases of student abuse in educational systems, the work reveals that sexual abuse of children in US K-12 schools is more prevalent than we'd like to believe. Examining the root causes and contexts, Shakeshaft concludes that school cultures and institutional structures are often complicit in cases of sexual misconduct.A burdensome experiment: race, labor, and schools in New Orleans after Katrina by Christien Philmarc Tompkins
Publication Date: 2024In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public school board fired nearly 7,500 teachers and employees. In the decade that followed, the city created the first urban public school system in the United States to be entirely contracted out to private management. Veteran educators, collectively referred to as the "backbone" of the city's Black middle class, were replaced by younger, less experienced, white teachers who lacked historical ties to the city. In A Burdensome Experiment, Christien Philmarc Tompkins argues that the privatization of New Orleans schools has made educators into a new kind of racialized worker. As school districts across the nation backslide on school integration, Tompkins asks, who exactly deserves to teach our children?Paradoxes of the public school: historical and contemporary foundations of American public education by James E. Schul
Publication Date: 2024"Revised thoroughly and updated, this second edition of Paradoxes of the Public School comprehensively explores public education in the United States. Researchers, faculty, and students will find this book accessible, insightful, and provocative. The book is packed with school history, theory, and data that are practically applied to a clear and fluid treatment of contemporary issues."Creating third spaces of learning for post-capitalism: lessons from educators and activists by Gary L. Anderson; Dipti Desai; Ana Inés Heras; Carol Anne Spreen
Publication Date: 2023In this book, the authors' post-capitalist approach to change focuses less on what we need to dismantle and more on what educators and activists are building in its place. Studying schools and other social organizations in the Global North and South, the authors identify and examine some of the most interesting counterhegemonic spaces in both formal and informal education today.The death of public school: how conservatives won the war over education in America by Cara Fitzpatrick
Publication Date: 2023America has relied on public schools for 150 years, but the system is increasingly under attack. With declining enrollment and diminished trust in public education, policies that steer tax dollars into private schools have grown rapidly. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice.The privateers: how billionaires created a culture war and sold school vouchers by Josh Cowen
Publication Date: 2024In The Privateers, Josh Cowen lays bare the surprising history of tax-funded school choice programs in the United States and warns of the dangers of education privatization. A former evaluator of state and local school voucher programs, Cowen demonstrates how, as such programs have expanded in the United States, so too has the evidence-informed case against them.The big lie about race in America's schools by Royel M. Johnson (Ed.); Shaun R. Harper (Ed.); H. Richard Milner (Series ed.)
Publication Date: 2024The Big Lie About Race in America's Schools delivers a collective response to the challenge of racially charged misinformation, disinformation, and censorship that increasingly permeates and weakens not only US education but also our democracy. In this thought-provoking volume, Royel Johnson and Shaun Harper bring together leading education scholars and educators to confront the weaponized distortions that are currently undermining both public education and racial justice. The experts gathered in this work offer strategies to counter these dangerous trends and uphold truth in education.The political economy of education by Martin Carnoy
Publication Date: 2024The Political Economy of Education provides academically rigorous yet clear explanations of the economics and politics driving today's educational systems and how economists analyze them. The book covers a host of topics central to teaching about education and crucial to educational policy. These include how to use the tools of economic and political theory to take critical measure of education's role in social mobility and economic growth, whether good teachers can overcome social class and race achievement gaps, the effectiveness of early childhood and vocational education, and debates on school accountability and whether increasing spending on schooling improves quality. The book also explores worldwide changes in higher education, especially massification and increased stratification and privatization.School resources, the achievement gap, and the law reconsidering school finance, policies, and resources in US education policy by David J. Armor; John Munich; Aron Malatinszky
Publication Date: 2024"This book offers a novel and up-to-date exploration of the common belief that increasing conventional school resources will increase academic achievement and help close gaps between various advantaged and disadvantaged students. Taking the scholarship around this question, such as James S. Colemans 1965 report on the Equality of Educational Opportunity, as a starting point, it brings in an extensive range of contemporary data sources and statistical analysis to offer an updated, robust and considered review of the issue. Moving beyond these empirical questions, it also explores how these empirical findings have been utilized in "education adequacy" litigation, discussing the evolving law of adequacy cases, while explaining the challenges of introducing complex data and analyses within a litigation framework."Off the mark : how grades, ratings, & rankings undermine learning (but don't have to) by Jack Schneider; Ethan L. Hutt
Publication Date: 2023"Today's regimes of testing and grading satisfy only the politicians who forced them on America's schools. Yet discarding assessment also serves students poorly. Off the Mark proposes an alternative, replacing motivation-killing tests and grading systems with well-designed assessment that accurately captures learning and fosters students' potential"
2022
Education policy and the political right: the burning fuse beneath schooling in the US, UK and Australia by Grant Rodwell
Publication Date: 2022During the past three or four decades in the US, the UK, and Australia, the Right has been remarkably successful in amassing political power. And in doing so, the right of politics in these countries has reshaped school educational policy and practice, a necessary step in securing the future of the Right as a political force.A guide to high-stakes standardized testing in the United States: a historical overview by Amy L. Kelly
Publication Date: 2022High-stakes standardized testing has a long history of exclusion, oppression, power, and control with deep roots in the landscape of American education. This history is essential to understanding our current realities of testing in the United States especially as they relate to marginalization and control of certain populations.Investing in the educational success of Black women and girls by Lori D. Patton (Ed.); Venus Evans-Winters (Ed.); Charlotte Jacobs (Ed.)
Publication Date: 2022"In the powerful essays that make up Investing in the Educational Success of Black Women and Girls, Black women and girls are listened to, appreciated and valued in recognition of the unrelenting challenges to our existence in a world that continues to be committed to stifling our voices. What these authors know intimately is that such stifling is not because what Black women and girls are saying isn't important: It is precisely because it is."Knowing your schools: controversial issues that further special interest groups by Jim Dueck
Publication Date: 2022This book identifies numerous conflicts within the field of education and provides the perspectives and information which stakeholders within the enterprise sweep aside or cover-up. An extensive data-base is used to demonstrate why existing policies and practices create unfair learning situations for our nation's children, frequently described as our most valuable resource.Performativity, politics and education: from policy to philosophy by Peter Roberts
Publication Date: 2022This book provides a distinctive perspective on some of the ways in which performativity, as an expression of neoliberal and managerialist thinking, 'works' in specific policy contexts. It pays particular attention to higher education and considers how the logic of performativity reconfigures our sense of what it means to engage in worthwhile research, what it means to be 'well', and, ultimately, what it means to be human.Public education: defending a cornerstone of American democracy by David C. Berliner (Ed.); Carl Hermanns (Ed.)
Publication Date: 2022In this important collection, eminent education scholars and practitioners remind us that our nation's system of free universal public education is under attack, putting our very democracy in jeopardy. Over and above preparing students for employability, American schools must prepare our youth to be informed citizens and active, constructive participants in the democratic process.Reexamining the federal role in higher education: politics and policymaking in the postsecondary sector by Rebecca S. Natow
Publication Date: 2022This book provides a comprehensive description of the federal government's relationship with higher education and how that relationship became so expansive and indispensable over time. Drawing from constitutional law, social science research, federal policy documents, and original interviews with key policy insiders, the author explores the U.S. government's role in regulating, financing, and otherwise influencing higher education.Stop the pendulum: public policy and personal experience in reading instruction and reform by William D. Bursuck; Craig Peck
Publication Date: 2022This is a book about the struggles over reforming reading instruction and the corresponding effort to improve reading achievement in the United States over the last seven decades.Students learning in communities: ideas and practices from the U.S.A., India, Russia, and China by Eija Kimonen; Raimo Nevalainen
Publication Date: 2022This book examines the interplay between education and society in the 20th and early 21st centuries and addresses philosophical views and educational aims with their associated values for community-based learning in the U.S.A., India, Russia, and China. The philosophical background of community-based learning in these countries relies both on national philosophical traditions and on reformist ideas in international schools of thought--over time opposition to certain international pedagogical ideas surfaced in these countries.When schools work: pluralist politics and institutional reform in Los Angeles by Bruce Fuller
Publication Date: 2022In When Schools Work, Bruce Fuller details the rise of civic activists in L.A. as they emerged from the ashes of urban riots and failed efforts to desegregate schools. Based on the author's fifteen years of field work in L.A., the book reveals how this network of Latino and Black leaders, civil rights lawyers, ethnic nonprofits, and pedagogical progressives coalesced in the 1990s, staking out a third political ground and gaining distance from corporate neoliberals and staid labor chiefs. Fuller shows how these young activists--whom he terms "new pluralists"--proceeded to better fund central-city schools, win quality teachers, widen access to college prep courses, decriminalize student discipline, and even create a panoply of new school forms, from magnet schools to dual-language campuses, site-run small high schools, and social-justice focused classrooms.Who should pay?: higher education, responsibility, and the public by Natasha Quadlin; Brian Powell
Publication Date: 2022Noting that public opinion often shapes public policy, sociologists Natasha Quadlin and Brian Powell examine public opinion on who should shoulder the increasing costs of higher education and why. Who Should Pay? draws on a decade's worth of public opinion surveys analyzing public attitudes about whether parents, students, or the government should be primarily responsible for funding higher education.
2021
Between the state and the schoolhouse: understanding the failure of common core by Tom Loveless
Publication Date: 2021Between the State and the Schoolhouse examines the Common Core State Standards from the initiative's promising beginnings to its disappointing outcomes. Situating the standards in the long history of state and federal efforts to shape education, the book describes a series of critical lessons that highlight the political and structural challenges of large-scale, top-down reforms.Beyond standards : the fragmentation of education governance and the promise of curriculum reform by Morgan Polikoff
Publication Date: 2021Beyond Standards highlights the structural conditions that have undermined the success of the standards movement and challenges us to confront them. The book offers an impassioned argument about the ways that our decentralized educational systems undermine the pursuit of educational equity and excellence.Can we measure what matters most?: why educational accountability metrics lower student learning and demoralize teachers by J. M. Beach; David Labaree (Foreword)
Publication Date: 2021This book examines the idea of educational accountability, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make schools better?Civic education in the age of mass migration: implications for theory and practice by Angela M. Banks; James A. Banks (Series ed.)
Publication Date: 2021Civic Education in the Age of Mass Migration examines the exclusionary aspects of citizenship and offers democratic societies an alternative approach that includes all long-term residents regardless of citizenship and immigration status. Banks reimagines a civic education curriculum that gives secondary students the knowledge and skills needed to move the United States toward a more perfect union.The commodification of American education: persistent threats and paths forward by T. Jameson Brewer (Ed.); Gregory Harman (Ed.)
Publication Date: 2021For the last few decades, teacher preparation has increasingly aligned itself with "best practices," standards, and accountability, and such policies became mandatory in P-12 schooling nationwide. Technical skills instruction and methods have become the common practice of teacher preparation and accreditation of programs. Teacher candidates are encouraged to be unquestioning servants of a school system rather than educators who govern the meaning of schooling. The purpose of this book is to present a view of how we got to where we are today and to offer strategies to bring the job of teaching back to its roots.Doing equity and diversity for success in higher education: redressing structural inequalities in the academy by Dave S. P. Thomas Thomas (Ed.); Jason Arday (Ed.)
Publication Date: 2021This book provides a forensic and collective examination of pre-existing understandings of structural inequalities in Higher Education Institutions. Going beyond the current understandings of causal factors that promote inequality, the editors and contributors illuminate the dynamic interplay between historical events and discourse and more sophisticate and racialized acts of violence. In doing so, the book crystallises myriad contemporary manifestations of structural racism in higher education.Education and the future of Latin America by Alejandro Manrique Toledo Manrique
Publication Date: 2021"Addresses the question: What will it take to overcome the many challenges that Latin America faces in developing quality, inclusive education for its diverse population?"The path to free college: in pursuit of access, equity, and prosperity by Michelle Miller-Adams
Publication Date: 2021In The Path to Free College, Michelle Miller-Adams argues that tuition-free college, if pursued strategically and in alignment with other sectors, can be a powerful agent of change. She makes the case that broadly accessible and affordable higher education is in the public interest, yielding dividends not just for individuals but also for the communities, states, and nation in which they reside.The personal, place, and context in pedagogy : an activist stance for our uncertain educational future by John M. Fischer (Ed.); Grzegorz Mazurkiewicz (Ed.)
Publication Date: 2021Together, the authors reflect on educational initiatives and life in democratic societies, arguing for an increased awareness of the educational processes at work within our contexts, places, and personal lives. Chapters argue that authority and knowledge belong to everyone and that these are found on every level of perceived educational hierarchies. This book calls for attention to be paid to the voices of teachers in school, students in the classroom, participants in a project, and researchers embedded in a community--highlighting that they all have something to teach about understanding the world all are working to create in an uncertain educational future.Politics, education, and social problems: complicated classroom conversations by Jennifer Rich
Publication Date: 2021This book offers an innovative perspective on the intersection of politics, education, and social problems. It considers how we can create social change by talking about politics and social problems in more open, direct, and inclusive ways in educational spaces. Drawing on data from a range of settings, this book closely examines how and when complicated conversations take place in classrooms, schools, and communities.School choice and the betrayal of democracy: how market-based education reform fails our communities by Robert Asen
Publication Date: 2021Evidence shows that the increasing privatization of K-12 education siphons resources away from public schools, resulting in poorer learning conditions, underpaid teachers, and greater inequality. But, as Robert Asen reveals here, the damage that market-based education reform inflicts on society runs much deeper. At their core, these efforts are antidemocratic.Transforming multicultural education policy and practice: expanding educational opportunity by James A. Banks (Ed.); Margaret Smith Crocco
Publication Date: 2021Together, these selections address how multicultural education should be transformed for a nation and world that are becoming increasingly complex due to virulent racism, pernicious nationalism, mass migrations, interracial mixing, social-class stratification, and a global pandemic.Understanding academic freedom by Henry Reichman
Publication Date: 2021Part of the acclaimed Higher Ed Leadership Essentials series, this book surveys academic freedom's history and its application in today's universities. Academic freedom is once again at the epicenter of the crisis in higher education.Unshackled: freeing America's K-12 education system by Clint Bolick; Kate J. Hardiman
Publication Date: 2021Clint Bolick and Kate J. Hardiman begin with a thought experiment: how would we structure a 21st-century K-12 school system if we were starting from scratch, attending to contemporary parental needs and harnessing the power of technology? Maintaining that the status quo is unacceptable, they take a forward-thinking look at how choice, competition, deregulation, and decentralization can create disruptive innovation and reform education for all students.
2020
Aristocratic education and the making of the American republic by Mark Boonshoft
Publication Date: 2020Following the American Revolution, it was a cliche that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites.Chasing success and confronting failure in American public schools by Larry Cuban
Publication Date: 2020Eminent historian and educator Larry Cuban provides a thorough examination of, and challenge to, past and present definitions of what constitutes educational success in the US. Cuban argues that in the history of American education, standards of achievement and inadequacy--as well as the reform efforts issuing from them--have been neither stable nor consistent. Nor are these standards untainted by political considerations.The crisis of the meritocracy Britain's transition to mass education since the Second World War by Peter Mandler
Publication Date: 2020Before the Second World War, only about 20% of the population went to secondary school and barely 2% to university; today everyone goes to secondary school and half of all young people go to university. How did we get here from there?The Crisis of the Meritocracy answers this question not by looking to politicians and educational reforms, but to the revolution in attitudes and expectations amongst the post-war British public - the rights guaranteed by the welfare state, the hope of a better life for one's children, widespreadupward mobility from manual to non-manual occupations, confidence in the importance of education in a "learning society" and a "knowledge economy".Education, conservatism, and the rise of a pedagogical elite in Colombian Panama 1878-1903 by Rolando de la Guardia Wald
Publication Date: 2020This book historically reconstructs the conservative and moderate liberals' views on governance, morality, and education within the context of La Regeneración (1878-1903) in Colombian Panama. de la Guardia Wald explores the way political theories and ideologies, especially conservatism and positivism, shaped late nineteenth-century Panamanian pedagogues' conceptualizations of proper education for the sake of social regeneration.Education for extinction: American Indians and the boarding school experience, 1875-1928 by David Wallace Adams
Publication Date: 2020The last "Indian War" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: "Kill the Indian and save the man." This fully revised edition of Education for Extinction offers the only comprehensive account of this dispiriting effort, and incorporates the last twenty-five years of scholarship.The education sector in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria: predisaster conditions, hurricane damage, and themes for recovery by Christopher Nelson; Jamie Ryan; Troy D. Smith; Anita Chandra; Andrea Prado Tuma; Terry Marsh; Megan Andrew; Drew M. Anderson; Anamarie A. Whitaker; Lynn A. Karoly; Robert F. Murphy; Nupur Nanda
Publication Date: 2020Presenting a strategic approach to aid Puerto Rico's recovery from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, the report details prestorm conditions, assesses damage and recovery needs, and describes courses of action for the Education sector. Analyses and discussions with local education stakeholders and subject-matter experts informed the development of 13 courses of action to support Puerto Rico's recovery plan and efforts to transform the education system.Evidence, politics, and education policy by Lorraine M. McDonnell; M. Stephen Weatherford
Publication Date: 2020In Evidence, Politics, and Education Policy, political scientists Lorraine M. McDonnell and M. Stephen Weatherford provide an original analysis of evidence use in education policymaking to help scholars and advocates shape policy more effectively. The book shows how multiple types of evidence are combined as elected officials and their staffs work with researchers, advocates, policy entrepreneurs, and intermediary organizations to develop, create, and implement education policies.Queer epistemologies in education: Luso-Hispanic dialogues and shared horizons by Moira Pérez (Ed.); Gracia Trujillo-Barbadillo (Ed.)
Publication Date: 2020This edited collection brings together the work of researchers and educators from Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Colombia, Costa Rica, Portugal,and Mexico on education, pedagogy, and research from a queer perspective.The teacher insurgency: a strategic and organizing perspective by Leo Casey
Publication Date: 2020In The Teacher Insurgency, Leo Casey addresses how the unexpected wave of recent teacher strikes has had a dramatic impact on American public education, teacher unions, and the larger labor movement. Casey explains how this uprising was not only born out of opposition to government policies that underfunded public schools and deprofessionalized teaching, but was also rooted in deep-seated changes in the economic climate, social movements, and, most importantly, educational politics.A wolf at the schoolhouse door: the dismantling of public education and the future of school [paper version] by Jack Schneider; Jennifer Berkshire
Publication Date: 2020A trenchant analysis of how public education is being destroyed in overt and deceptive ways--and how to fight back. Betsy DeVos may be the most prominent face of the push to dismantle public education, but she is in fact part of a large movement that's been steadily gaining power and notching progress for decades--amassing funds, honing their messaging, and crafting policies. While support for public education today is stronger than ever, the movement to save our schools remains fragmented, variable, and voluntary.
- Last Updated: Feb 7, 2025 10:38 AM
- URL: https://guides.library.stanford.edu/ed_policy
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