Harvard University Press - EDUCATION

The Ordeal of Equality

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

David K. Cohen
Susan L. Moffitt
American schools have always been locally created and controlled. But ever since the Title I program in 1965 appropriated nearly one billion dollars for public schools, federal money and programs have been influencing every school in America. With incisive clarity and wit, David Cohen and Susan Moffitt argue that enormous gaps existed between policies and programs, and the real-world practices that they attempted to change.
Hardcover October 2009

Artscience

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

David Edwards
This book is an attempt to show how innovation in the "post-Google generation" is often catalyzed by those who cross a conventional line so firmly drawn between the arts and the sciences. Edwards describes how contemporary creators achieve breakthroughs in the arts and sciences by developing their ideas in an intermediate zone of human creativity where neither art nor science is easily defined.
Paperback October 2009

The Race between Education and Technology

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Claudia Goldin
Lawrence F. Katz
This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This boosted income for most people and lowered inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this educational slow-down and what might be done to ameliorate it.
Paperback October 2009

The College Fear Factor

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Rebecca D. Cox
Rebecca D. Cox draws on five years of interviews and observations at community colleges, where she shows how students and their instructors misunderstand and ultimately fail one another, despite good intentions. Eye-opening even for experienced faculty and administrators, The College Fear Factor reveals how the traditional college culture can actually pose obstacles to students’ success, and suggests strategies for effectively explaining academic expectations.
Hardcover October 2009

The Trials of Academe

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Amy Gajda
Once upon a time, virtually no one in the academy thought to sue over campus disputes, and, if they dared, judges bounced the case on grounds that it was no business of the courts. Not so today. As Amy Gajda shows in this witty yet troubling book, litigation is now common on campus, and perhaps even more commonly feared. This book explores the origins and causes of the litigation trend, its implications for academic freedom, and what lawyers, judges, and academics themselves can do to limit the potential damage.
Hardcover October 2009

Creating a Class

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Mitchell L. Stevens
In real life, Stevens is a professor at Stanford University. But for a year and a half, he worked in the admissions office of a bucolic New England college known for its high academic standards, beautiful campus, and social conscience. Ambitious high schoolers and savvy guidance counselors know that admission here is highly competitive. But creating classes, Stevens finds, is a lot more complicated than most people imagine.
Paperback September 2009

Measuring Up

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Daniel Koretz
Measuring Up demystifies educational testing—from MCAS to SAT to WAIS. Bringing statistical terms down to earth, Koretz takes readers through the most fundamental issues that arise in educational testing and shows how they apply to some of the most controversial issues in education today, from high-stakes testing to special education.
Paperback September 2009

The Best of the Best

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández
For two years, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández shared the life of what he calls the “Weston School,” an elite New England boarding school. Vividly describing the pastoral landscape and graceful buildings, the rich variety of classes and activities, and the official and unofficial rules that define the school, The Best of the Best reveals a small world of deeply ambitious, intensely pressured students. For Gaztambide-Fernández, Weston is daunting yet strikingly bucolic, inspiring but frustratingly incurious, and sometimes—especially for young women—a gilded cage for a gilded age.
Hardcover September 2009

The Gates Unbarred

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Michael Shinagel
The Gates Unbarred traces the evolution of University Extension at Harvard from the Lyceum movement in Boston to its creation by the newly appointed president A. Lawrence Lowell in 1910. For a century University Extension has provided community access to Harvard, including the opportunity for women and men to earn a degree.
Hardcover September 2009

Teaching What You Don’t Know

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Therese Huston
Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you're lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. In this practical and funny book, an experienced teaching consultant offers many creative strategies for dealing with typical problems. Original, useful, and hopeful, this book reminds you that teaching what you don't know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job. It's an adventure.
Hardcover August 2009

The Sandbox Investment

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT

David L. Kirp
The rich have always valued early education, and for the past forty years, millions of poorer kids have had Head Start. Now, more and more middle class parents have realized that a good preschool is the smartest investment they can make in their children's future in a competitive world. Writing with the verve of a magazine journalist and the authority of a scholar, Kirp makes the ideal guide to this quiet movement and campaign.
Paperback May 2009

Hope and Despair in the American City

Sat, 30 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Gerald Grant
In Hope and Despair, Gerald Grant compares two cities—his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina—in order to examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing educational inequities. The result is an ambitious portrait—sometimes disturbing, often inspiring—of two cities that exemplify our nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.
Hardcover May 2009

The Program Era

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Mark McGurl
In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.
Hardcover April 2009

How Professors Think

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Michèle Lamont
Everyone in academia stresses quality. But what exactly is it, and how do professors identify it? Michèle Lamont observed deliberations for fellowships and research grants, and interviewed panel members at length. In How Professors Think, she reveals what she discovered about this secretive, powerful, peculiar world. Lamont aims to illuminate the confidential process of evaluation and to push the gatekeepers to both better understand and perform their role.
Hardcover March 2009

The Golden Age of the Classics in America

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Carl J. Richard
In a masterful study Carl Richard explores how the Greek and Roman classics became enshrined in American antebellum culture. For the first time, knowledge of the classics extended beyond aristocratic males to the middle class, women, African Americans, and frontier settlers. The Civil War led to a radical alteration of the educational system in a way that steadily eroded the preeminence of the classics.
Hardcover March 2009

The Latino Education Crisis

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Patricia Gándara
Frances Contreras
Drawing on both extensive demographic data and compelling case studies, this book reveals the depths of the educational crisis looming for Latino students, the nation’s largest and most rapidly growing minority group.
Hardcover January 2009

Tapping the Riches of Science

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Roger L. Geiger
Creso M. Sá
American universities are under increasing pressure to maximize their economic contributions. This book offers a rigorous and far-sighted explanation of this controversial and little-understood movement.
Hardcover January 2009

Speaking Up

Thu, 8 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Anne Proffitt Dupre
Dupre examines the way courts have wrestled with student expression in school. Speaking Up offers eye-opening history for students, teachers, lawyers, and parents seeking to understand how the law attempts to balance order and freedom in schools.
Hardcover January 2009

Innocents Abroad

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

Jonathan Zimmerman
Until the early twentieth century, teachers went abroad with assumptions of their own superiority. But by the mid-twentieth century, they became far more self-questioning about their social assumptions, their educational theories, and the complexity of their role in a foreign society. Drawing on extensive archives of teachers' letters and accounts, Zimmerman's narrative explores the teachers' shifting attitudes about their country and themselves, in a world that was more unexpected than they could have imagined.
Paperback December 2008

Investing in College

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

Malcolm Getz
College education is one of the most important investments a family will make, but the process can be a headache for students and their parents. In a unique approach to this issue, economist and teacher Getz walks readers through the opportunities, risks, and rewards of heading off to college, breaking down confusing admissions and financial options.
Paperback December 2008