The death of a student, especially to gun violence, is a life-changing experience that occurs with more and more frequency in America’s schools. For each of these tragedies, there is a classroom and there is a teacher. Yet student death is often a forbidden subject, removed from teacher education and professional development classes where the curriculum is focused instead on learning about standards, lesson plans, and pedagogy. What can and should teachers do when the unbearable happ...

Overturns common misconceptions about charter schools, school "choice," standardized tests, common core curriculum, and teacher evaluations.Three distinguished educators, scholars, and activists flip the script on many enduring and popular myths about teachers, teachers' unions, and education that permeate our culture. By unpacking these myths, and underscoring the necessity of strong and vital public schools as a common good, the authors challenge readers--whether...

Rick and William Ayers renew their challenge to teachers to teach initiative, to teach imagination, to “teach the taboo” in the new edition of this bestseller. Drawing from a lifetime of deep commitment to students, teaching, and social justice, the authors update their powerful critique of schooling and present classroom stories of everyday teachers grappling with many of today’s hotly debated issues. They invite educators to live a teaching life of questioning—to imagine classrooms where...

Inspired by the life and work of Bill Ayers—particularly his advice to “teach into the contradiction”—Diving In reflects the intellectual adventures that Ayers has always encouraged those around him to undertake. Written by leading educators and activists, the collected chapters within this book are as diverse as the myriad contradictions that teachers encounter in their day-to-day practice and their out-of-class musings. The contributors use themes suggest...

Efforts to reduce gun violence in the United States face formidable political and constitutional barriers. Legislation that would ban or broadly restrict firearms runs afoul of the Supreme Court's current interpretation of the Second Amendment. And gun rights advocates have joined a politically savvy firearm industry in a powerful coalition that stymies reform.Ian Ayres and Fredrick Vars suggest a new way forward. We can decrease the number of gun deaths, they argue, by empowering ...

"Me too. It happened to me too."More than one in five women and 5 percent of men are sexually assaulted while at college. Some survivors are coming forward; others are not. In We Believe You, students from every kind of college and university—large and small, public and private, highly selective and less so—share experiences of trauma, healing, and everyday activism, representing a diversity of races, economic and family backgrounds, gender identities, immi...

"It is only when we forget our learning that we begin to know," Thoreau wrote. Ideas about education permeate Thoreau's writing. Uncommon Learning brings those ideas together in a single volume for the first time.

This graphic novel brings to life William Ayers’s bestselling memoir To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Third Edition. From Ayers’s early days teaching kindergarten, readers follow this renowned educational theorist on his “voyage of discovery and surprise.” We meet fellow travelers from schools across the country and watch students grow across a year and a lifetime.To Teach is a vivid, honest portrayal of the everyday magic of teaching, and what it means to be a...

The first comprehensive history of sex education around the worldToo Hot to Handle is the first truly international history of sex education. As Jonathan Zimmerman shows, the controversial subject began in the West and spread steadily around the world over the past century. As people crossed borders, however, they joined hands to block sex education from most of their classrooms. Examining key players who supported and opposed the sex education movement, Zi...

Constrained by shrinking budgets, can colleges do more to improve the quality of education? And can students get more out of college without paying higher tuition? Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs conclude that limited resources need not diminish the undergraduate experience. How College Works reveals the decisive role that personal relationships play in determining a student's success, and puts forward a set of small, inexpensive interventions that yield substantial improv...

High Schools are jungles. And there are rules for surviving. All teenagers need to know these rules. They’re pretty simple: never let your mom drive you to school in her dressing-gown. Never let her comment on your Facebook page. Never let her choose your clothes. Especially not your underwear. Common sense, right? Thirteen-year-old Ben Smith, flying under the radar at St David’s, a rugby-worshipping school, knew all the rules. His mom knew them, too. That’s why he trusted her to be cool. ...

Cyberbullying in social media is one of the most important concerns in educational institutions at the K-12 and higher education levels today. Cyberbullying is complicated because it involves children, parents, and other family members as well as society at-large. It hurts the victim, the cyberbully, their families, their friends, others at and beyond the school, and our American society in countless direct and indirect ways — educationally, emotionally, mentally, physically, socially, and...