Defending Public Schools addresses the historical, current, and future context of public education in the United States. While the essays provide an overview of education and schooling issues, the overarching concern is that public schools are under attack and deserve to be defended. Since 80% of America's student-aged population attend public schools, a fair and balanced look at a school system that has educated and continues to educate a population that is diverse in every way possible, is sorely needed. It can be said that a national school system has never had to educate so many young people through secondary school with mastery of so much information. While no one rejects the necessity of school reform to meet contemporary needs, the question of how to achieve the greatest good for the greatest numbers remains for thousand of schools across the nation. Defending Public Schools is a practical, necessary addition to the work of administrators, teachers, policy makers, and parents as they negotiate the difficult path of how to best teach and educate today's children and youth.
Defending Public Schools (Vols. 1-4)
E. Wayne Ross is Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. He research interests focus on the influence of social and institutional contexts on teachers' practice as well as the role of curriculum and teaching in building a democratic society in the face of antidemocratic impulses of greed, individualism, and intolerance. In recent years he has examined the influence of the educational standards and high-stakes testing movements on curriculum and teaching. His most recent research investigates the surveillance-based and spectacular conditions of (post)modern schools and society in an effort to develop both a radical critique of the "disciplinary gaze" and a means by which teachers, students and other stakeholders might resist its various conformative, anti-democratic, anti-collective, and oppressive potentialities. He has published in a wide variety of academic journals as well as the popular press, including Z Magazine. His books include: Neoliberalism and Education Reform (edited with Rich Gibson); The Social Studies Curriculum; Race, Ethnicity and Education; Defending Public Schools, and many others.Ross is a co-founder of The Rouge Forum, a group of educators, parents, and students seeking a democratic society. He is also editor of several academic journals, including Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, Cultural Logic, and Critical Education. A former secondary social studies (grades 8-12) and day care teacher in North Carolina and Georgia, Dr. Ross was Distinguished University Scholar and Chair of the Department of Teaching at the University of Louisville prior to his arrival at UBC in 2004. He has also been a faculty member at the State University of New York campuses at Albany and Binghamton.