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EDF 3604—Readings Page

Required readings

Books

Students must read two books, which are available at Books for Thought (10910 56th St., 3 blocks south of Fowler, past the Dairy Queen and a bank on the same side).

One of the following:

Delpit, Lisa.  1995.  Other people's children:  Cultural conflict in the classroom.  New York:  New Press.

Michie, Gregory. 1999. Holler if you hear me: The education of a teacher and his students. New York: Teachers College Press.

Kozol, Jonathan. 1991. Savage inequalities: Children in America's schools. New York: Crown Publishers.

One of the following, as well:

Meier, Deborah. 1995. The power of their ideas: Lessons for America from a small school in Harlem. Boston: Beacon Press.

Sizer, Theodore R. 1992. Horace's School (rev. ed.). New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Students are responsible for acquiring books in a timely manner; the bookstore sends unpurchased copies back at some point in the semester.

Course pack

Becker, Gary. 1993. Human capital revisited. In Becker, Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education (3rd ed.) (pp. 15-25). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bowles, Samuel. 1972. Getting nowhere: Programmed class stagnation. Society 9, 8 (June): 42-49.

Brown v. Board of Education I, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), and II, 349 U.S. 294 (1955).

Coontz, Stephanie. 1989. In search of a golden age. In Context 21 (Spring), available on-line at http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC21/Coontz.htm

Cuban, Larry. 1992. Why some reforms last: The case of the kindergarten. American Journal of Education 100: 166-94.

Fine, Michelle. 1986. Why urban adolescents drop into and out of public high school. Teachers College Record 87: 393-408.

Mickelson, Roslyn Arlin. 1989. Why does Jane read and write so well? The anomaly of women's achievement. Sociology of Education 62: 47-63.

Ogbu, John U. 1995. Cultural problems in minority education: Their interpretations and consequences—Part One. Urban Review 27: 189-205.

Rivkin, Steven G. 1994. Residential segregation and school integration. Sociology of Education 67: 279-92.

Strober, Myra H., and David Tyack. 1980. Why do women teach and men manage? A report on research on schools. Signs 5: 494-503.

Readings on reserve

Student-led interactive teaching will rely on the following bibliography of items I hold for student check-out. Students should consider these reserve items as a supplementary reading source during the semester and use the annotations I have provided to select readings appropriate to individual interests and concerns. Students may also ask me at any time to recommend additional readings.

Apple, Michael. 1988. "Teaching and 'women's work.'" In Teachers and texts: A political economy of class and gender relations in education. New York: Routledge. Apple explores why teachers have low status and whether that has any connection with most teachers' being women.

Bell, Derrick. 1987. Neither separate nor equal. Excerpt from And we are not saved: The elusive quest for racial justice. New York: Basic Books. Bell describes the ambivalence of many African Americans towards the legal pursuit of equal educational opportunity through desegregation.

Dreeben, Robert. 1968. "Contributions of schooling toward the learning of norms." In On what is learned in school (Chap. 5). Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. The classic piece on hidden curriculum. A little dense; my favorite is his discussion of what schools teach about collaboration.

Graebner, William. 1989. "Themes" and "Social engineering." In Coming of age in Buffalo : youth and authority in the postwar era (selected pages). Philadelphia : Temple University Press. Graebner's book is one of the unheralded great little books of postwar social history. It focuses on one city and has some great material about attitudes towards adolescents. Fun reading, with some deep issues underneath.

Grubb, W. Norton, and Marvin Lazerson. 1988. "Youth policy." In Broken promises. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grubb and Lazerson's chapter on youth and work policy over the past several decades. Very detailed and provocative.

Hobbs, Nicholas. 1966. Helping disturbed children: Psychological and ecological strategies. American Psychologist 21: 1105-1115. The classic article on ecological versus deficit approaches to disabilities.

Johnson, John L. 1969. "Special education and the inner city: A challenge for the future or another means for cooling the mark out?" Journal of Special Education 3: 241–51. A classic denunciation of special education—and, even more so, general education—for failing African-American students. Johnson still believes in liberation education, almost twenty years after this article.

Kett, Joseph F. 1977. "Stages of life." In Rites of passage : Adolescence in America 1790 to the present (Chap. 1). New York: Basic Books. Kett describes how our modern categories of age were meaningless to colonial North Americans.

Labov, William. 1972. "The logic of non-standard English." In Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. The classic work on Black English as a dialect—and what teachers and psychologists who don't recognize the difference do to students.

MacLeod, Jay. 1995. "The brothers: Dreams deferred." In Ain't no makin' it: Aspirations and attainment in a low-income neighborhood (expanded ed.). Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. MacLeod follows up a group of mostly African-American young men in a midwestern city in the late 1980s and finds that their diligence in high school did not necessarily earn them a good life.

Mercer, Jane R. 1971. "Sociocultural factors in labeling mental retardates." Peabody Journal of Education 48; 3: 188–203. The classic work describing the labeling of poor, minority children as mentally retarded.

Ray, Carol Axtell, and Roslyn Arlin Mickelson. 1993. Restructuring students for restructured work: The economy, school reform, and non-college-bound youths. Sociology of Education 66: 1-20. (Available at http://www.jstor.org/jstor/ from a USF account.) The authors view business-oriented reforms skeptically; they discuss both human capital and social reproduction theory.

Rist, Ray. 1970. "Student social class and teacher expectations: The self-fulfilling prophecy in ghetto education." Harvard Educational Review 40, 3 (August). The classic article on self-fulfilling prophecies in teacher expectations.

White House. 1997. Remarks by President Clinton at Race Outreach Meeting [Transcript of conversation among President Bill Clinton and conservatives on affirmative action]. Retrieved 2001 from http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/New/html/19971223-7462.html

Winterer, Caroline. 1992. "Avoiding a 'hothouse system of education.'" History of Education Quarterly 32: 289–314. Contrasts early 19th century infant schools (a movement which failed) with late 19th century kindergarten movement.

Copyright © 1997-2001, Sherman Dorn