David Harding

Wendy Roth

Katherine S. Newman

Jal Mehta

Cybelle Fox

A distinguished sociologist reveals the warning signs of a school shooter--and why we so often miss them Parkland. Sandy Hook. Columbine. The list of school shootings gets longer by the day, and it often seems like no school is safe. Over the last decades, school shootings have decimated communities and terrified parents, teachers, and children in even the most family friendly American towns and suburbs. We talk about these tragedies as the spontaneous acts of disconnected teens, but this important book argues that the roots of violence are deeply entwined in the communities themselves. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with town residents, sociologist Katherine Newman and her co-authors take the reader inside two of the most notorious school shootings of the 1990s, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Paducah, Kentucky. In a powerful and original analysis, she demonstrates that the organizational structure of schools encourage administrators to "lose" information about troubled kids, and the very closeness of these small rural towns restrained neighbors and friends from communicating what they knew about their problems. Rampage challenges the "loner theory" of school violence and shows why so many adults and students miss the warning signs that could prevent it.

The Social Roots of School Shootings

Rampage

Frederick M. Hess

Robert B. Schwartz

The futures of school reform

Sarah Fine

Winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Education “The best book on high school dynamics I have ever read.” —Jay Mathews, Washington Post “A hopeful, easy-to-read narrative on what the best teachers do and what deep, engaging learning looks like for students. Grab this text if you’re looking for a celebration of what’s possible in American schools.” —Edutopia “A must-read for anyone interested in the fate of the American high school.” —Linda Darling-Hammond, President and CEO, Learning Policy Institute What would it take to transform our high schools into places capable of supporting deep learning for students across a wide range of aptitudes and interests? To find out, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine spent hundreds of hours observing and talking to teachers and students in and out of the classroom at thirty of the country’s most innovative schools. To their dismay, they discovered that deeper learning is more often the exception than the rule. And yet they found pockets of powerful learning at almost every school, often in extracurriculars but also in a few mold-breaking academic courses. So what must schools do to achieve the integrations that support deep learning: rigor with joy, precision with play, mastery with identity and creativity? In Search of Deeper Learning takes a deep dive into the state of our schools and lays out an inspiring new vision for American education.

Inside the Effort to Remake the American High School

In Search of Deeper Learning

Explores why reformers from both the left and right have repeatedly placed such high hopes in these reforms and why teachers and schools have been unable to resist these external reformers.

High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling

The Allure of Order

Jal Mehta

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