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School Choice and School Improvement
(2011, Harvard Education Press) edited by Mark Behrends, Marisa Cannata, senior research associate, and Ellen Goldring, Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Education Policy and Leadership, brings together a collection of papers that examines how communities, districts and states use choice as a strategy for improving schools and student learning. The book includes research on private schools and vouchers, charter schools and traditional public schools, and intra-district transfer programs, adding depth and perspective to ongoing debates about school choice options.
The Survivors
(2011, Chafie Press) a young adult novel by Amanda Havard, BS’08, MEd’10, sets its back story in 1692, when 26 children are accused as witches in Salem, Mass., ultimately exiled and left for dead, but 14 of them survive. This first novel in a proposed series chronicles Sadie, whose family has been content to be in hiding for more than three centuries. When Sadie abandons the family’s hiding place in Montana, she relinquishes the human world to which she’s sought to belong for more than a century, returning to her Puritanical family and an uncertain future filled with witches, shape-shifters, millennia-old mythology and the search for her own mortality.
Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century
(2011, Princeton University Press) by Christopher Loss, assistant professor of public policy and higher education, tracks the outcomes of the federal government’s growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. The book looks at higher education’s central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the 20th century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state.