6 Books Published by Teachers College on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Strong Black Girls lays bare the harm Black women and girls are expected to overcome in order to receive an education in America. This edited volume amplifies the routinely muffled voices and experiences of Black women and girls in schools through storytelling, essays, letters, and poetry. The authors make clear that the strength of Black women and girls should not merely be defined as the ability to survive racism, abuse, and violence. Readers will also see resistance and resilience emerge through the central themes that shape these reflective, coming-of-age narratives. Each chapter is punctuated by discussion questions that extend the conversation around the everyday realities of navigating K-12 schools, such as sexuality, intergenerational influence, self-love, anger, leadership, aesthetic trauma (hair and body image), erasure, rejection, and unfiltered Black girlhood.

Book Features:

• A spotlight on the invisible barriers impacting Black girls’ educational trajectories.
• A survey of the intersectional notions of strength and Black femininity within the context of K-12 schooling.
• Narrative therapy through unpacking system stories of oppression and triumph.
• Insights for building skills and tools to make substantial and lasting change in schools.

The revised edition of Loewen’s book builds upon the first edition by applying these principles to contemporary circumstances. For example, a new chapter addresses post-truth politics and the Trump presidency. This makes Loewen’s work more valuable than ever for students, educators, and communities. —Teachers College Record

This is the new edition of the award-winning guide to social justice education.

Based on the authors’ extensive experience in a range of settings in the United States and Canada, the book addresses the most common stumbling blocks to understanding social justice. This comprehensive resource includes new features such as a chapter on intersectionality and classism; discussion of contemporary activism (Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and Idle No More); material on White Settler societies and colonialism; pedagogical supports related to "common social patterns" and "vocabulary to practice using"; and extensive updates throughout.

Accessible to students from high school through graduate school, Is Everyone Really Equal? is a detailed and engaging textbook and professional development resource presenting the key concepts in social justice education. The text includes many user-friendly features, examples, and vignettes to not just define but illustrate the concepts.

Book Features:

• Definition Boxes that define key terms.
• Stop Boxes to remind readers of previously explained ideas.
• Perspective Check Boxes to draw attention to alternative standpoints.
• Discussion Questions and Extension Activities for using the book in a class, workshop, or study group.
• A Glossary of terms and guide to language use.

’Hill’s book is a beautifully written reminder that the achievement gaps that students experience may be more accurately characterized as cultural gaps—between them and their teachers (and the larger society). This is a book that helps us see the power and potential of pedagogy. It is not merely what Hill decides to teach that matters. It is also how he teaches it that connects with the students.’
— From the Foreword by Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin-Madison



’Offering a complex representation of the history, uses, and modes of storytelling that has made hip-hop one of the most powerful markers of contemporary youth culture, Marc Lamont Hill has written a book that brilliantly engages all of the important issues about youth, memory, race, and education that are crucial to understanding and engaging hip-hop culture. This book is invaluable for anyone interested in hip-hop culture, identity, education, and youth.’
— Henry Giroux, author, The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear, Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Ontario



For over a decade, educators have looked to capitalize on the appeal of hip-hop culture, sampling its language, techniques, and styles as a way of reaching out to students. But beyond a fashionable hipness, what does hip-hop have to offer our schools? In this revelatory new book, Marc Lamont Hill shows how a serious engagement with hip-hop culture can affect classroom life in extraordinary ways. Based on his experience teaching a hip-hop-centered English literature course in a Philadelphia high school, and drawing from a range of theories on youth culture, identity, and educational processes, Hill offers a compelling case for the power of hip-hop in the classroom. In addition to driving up attendance and test performance, Hill shows how hip-hop based educational settings enable students and teachers to renegotiate their classroom identities in complex, contradictory, and often unpredictable ways.

Yes, we should hold public schools accountable for effectively spending the vast funds with which they have been entrusted. But accountability policies like No Child Left Behind, based exclusively on math and reading test scores, have narrowed the curriculum, misidentified both failing and successful schools, and established irresponsible expectations for what schools can accomplish.

Instead of just grading progress in one or two narrow subjects, we should hold schools accountable for the broad outcomes we expect from public education —basic knowledge and skills, critical thinking, an appreciation of the arts, physical and emotional health, and preparation for skilled employment —and then develop the means to measure and ensure schools’ success in achieving them. Grading Education describes a new kind of accountability plan for public education, one that relies on higher-quality testing, focuses on professional evaluation, and builds on capacities we already possess. This important resource:

• Describes the design of an alternative accountability system that would not corrupt education as does NCLB and its state testing systems
• Explains the original design of NAEP in the 1960s, and shows why it should be revived.
• Defines the broad goals of education, beyond math and reading test scores, and reports on surveys to confirm public and governmental support for such goals.
• Relates these broad goals of education to the desire for accountability in education.

Contemporary public policy assumes that the achievement gap between black and white students could be closed if only schools would do a better job. According to Richard Rothstein, "Closing the gaps between lower-class and middle-class children requires social and economic reform as well as school improvement. Unfortunately, the trend is to shift most of the burden to schools, as if they alone can eradicate poverty and inequality." In this book, Rothstein points the way toward social and economic reforms that would give all children a more equal chance to succeed in school.

Features:

• A summary of numerous studies linking school achievement to health care quality, nutrition, childrearing styles, housing stability, parental economic security, and more.
• A look at erroneous and misleading data that underlie commonplace claims that some schools "beat the demographic odds and therefore any school can close the achievement gap if only it adopted proper practices."
• Analysis of how the over-emphasis on standardized tests in federal law obscures the true achievement gap and makes narrowing it more difficult.
• Description of rarely-noticed racial and socio-economic gaps in "non-cognitive" skills.
• Estimates of the cost of reforms that could help narrow the achievement gap, such as including early childhood, after-school, and summer programs into a broader definition of schooling.