The body of the text proceeds to identify and explain many flashpoints which are current in a world of education where students’ best interests are hampered by teachers’ self-interests. Whenever an issue emerges in education and is analyzed in the context of what is best for students or teachers, teacher unions naturally pursue benefit for their members. This does not demean their effort; rather, it explains their intentions, and making their objectives transparent is a recurring theme throughout the book. Dueck demonstrates that politicians are a core part of the problem because of their predilection for siding with power structures in society, namely unions and teachers rather than the clients of their services. Their thirst for votes from teachers’ unions, which represent one of the largest special interest groups within our communities, is not only a contributing factor in causing but also ameliorating these flashpoints. Underlying this thirst for electoral support is the reality that students cannot vote and do not have capacity for discerning how these complex educational issues impact them.

Covering a timely topic, which is more and more frequently in the news, this book offers vignettes that will sharpen the reader's ability to recognize and respond to difficult situations sparked by identity differences among faculty, staff, and students in college and university settings. The authors provide a systematic guide to addressing interpersonal conflicts that arise out of issues of identity difference, both for individuals and for campus work teams who provide direct service to students. Managing Diversity Flashpoints in Higher Education empowers readers to diagnose diversity flashpoint situations and positively address them without creating defensiveness and barriers to dialogue. The authors include an overview of the changing ethnic, racial, and gender composition of students in higher education in the United States and the major trends in campus responses to the changing student population. They offer an approach to creating higher education environments that welcome people of all cultural characteristics and promote civility on campus. The book is founded on the authors' research on diversity flashpoints in higher education for which they interviewed a national sample of student affairs professionals. The authors identified uncomfortable interpersonal situations with faculty members in which the discomfort arose from student identity difference. This process led to the formulation of strategies for using vignettes (resulting from interviews) in professional development sessions.

A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An award-winning constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago (who clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) gives us an engaging and alarming book that aims to vindicate the rights of public school stu­dents, which have so often been undermined by the Supreme Court in recent decades. Judicial decisions assessing the constitutional rights of students in the nation’s public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to un­authorized immigration, from antiwar protests to compul­sory flag salutes, from economic inequality to teacher-led prayer—these are but a few of the cultural anxieties dividing American society that the Supreme Court has addressed in elementary and secondary schools. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education and illuminates contemporary disputes that continue to fracture the nation. Justin Driver maintains that since the 1970s the Supreme Court has regularly abdicated its responsibility for protecting students’ constitutional rights and risked trans­forming public schools into Constitution-free zones. Students deriving lessons about citizenship from the Court’s decisions in recent decades would conclude that the following actions taken by educators pass constitutional muster: inflicting severe corporal punishment on students without any proce­dural protections, searching students and their possessions without probable cause in bids to uncover violations of school rules, random drug testing of students who are not suspected of wrongdoing, and suppressing student speech for the view­point it espouses. Taking their cue from such decisions, lower courts have upheld a wide array of dubious school actions, including degrading strip searches, repressive dress codes, draconian “zero tolerance” disciplinary policies, and severe restrictions on off-campus speech. Driver surveys this legal landscape with eloquence, highlights the gripping personal narratives behind landmark clashes, and warns that the repeated failure to honor students’ rights threatens our basic constitutional order. This magiste­rial book will make it impossible to view American schools—or America itself—in the same way again.

The 21st century is steeped in claims to interconnection, technological innovation, and new affective intensities amid challenges to the primacy and centrality of "the human". Flashpoint epistemology attends to the lived difficulties that arise in teaching, policymaking, curriculum, and research among continuous practices of differentiation, and for which there is no pre-existing template for judgment, resolution, or action. Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 2 brings creative sociopolitical research perspectives to flashpoints that emerge amid appeals to globalization, synoptic policy approaches, and new technologies – however defined. The chapters challenge prevailing notions of distance and difference, comparative philosophy, worlding practices, and contact zones. In the remaking of subjects, the unhoming of geopolitics, and new approaches to relationality, youth, and classrooms, complexities in preserving and questioning identity are laid bare and renovated. How technologies challenge and redefine racialization, engendering, and inter/nationalization are examined amid the reworking of oppression, success, well-being, politics, method, and power. The volume will be beneficial for researchers seeking new approaches to education’s complexities, nested discourses, and ever-moving horizons of enactment. It is also a key text for post/graduate students and teachers interested in technological impact, globality, policymaking, and new ways of conducting research in contexts of digitalization and social media.

ATTENTION: ALL FACULTY & ADMINISTRATORS“Another book on student ratings? Are you kidding me?” “Nope, but this one is REALLY different.” Another review of the research or step-by-step on how to develop and interpret rating scales? NOT! (Berk did that with Thirteen Strategies) Designed to solve YOUR problems, conflicts, and confusion about how to evaluate teaching. Written expressly for YOU with Berk’s signature sense of humor.FLASHPOINT: a critical stage in a process, trouble spot, contentious issue, volatile hot button, or lowest temperature at which a flammable liquid will give off enough vapor to igniteThe “flashpoints” covered are the topics that pop up the most frequently and heatedly on listservs, blogs, and the literature. Each flashpoint is defined succinctly, options are presented, and then evidence-based recommendations for concrete action steps are proffered in an effort to stop the popping.The recommendations are grounded in psychometric, professional, and legal standards. The last-named, in particular, can protect you from costly litigation. If you hire, promote, demote, and fire full- and part-time faculty based on student ratings and other measures, then you are vulnerable to violations of federal anti-discrimination laws. Several flashpoints address procedures you can take to stay out of court. If you are a faculty member, you need to know whether your institution’s measures of teaching are appropriate and defensible, and what you should do if they are not.Four sample “flashpoints” and solutions:• Use of global items for summative decisions. SOLUTION: “Cease & desist” and use scale and subscale ratings• Low response rate in online administrations. SOLUTION: 20 strategies to increase rates• Scales to evaluate online and blended/hybrid courses. SOLUTION: 7 strategies are suggested and evaluated • Use of ratings for contract renewal, pay raise, teaching awards, and promotion and tenure. SOLUTION: Applying 80/20 rule for adverse impact to avoid lawsuits related to unequal pay, gender, race, ethnicity, and age discrimination

The majority of students are required to attend their neighborhood public school unless their parents apply to an alternate program such as private and charter schools. Seldom is a comprehensive measurement program in place for parents to assist them in determining whether their local school is providing quality educational services and, when a reporting system is in place, an unbiased evaluation is lacking. This book demonstrates how parents can make informed choices regarding their local school or others within their community. The accountability model presented was highly rated by the U.S. Department of Education and its approach is used in Alberta and California. Fixed boundaries should be replaced and all schools labeled as “magnet centers” with locally developed mission statements to attract students without transportation costs. Democratizing the workplace is as necessary as democratizing our schools so that workers are recognized and rewarded according to their team’s performance.

Education for this generation’s youth is the key for our nation’s future well-being but it is now threatened by political correctness. A politically correct environment seeks to avoid controversial issues by maintaining the status quo on matters related to workers in the education system while avoiding the best interests of the stakeholders, and it is for this reason that political correctness must be challenged on many issues in our school system, so that our children have a better chance for learning well and then living well. This book’s focus is on using accountability to pressure the system toward implementing reforms necessary for winning. It deals with educational policies, which are controversial and also identified by others for being problematic, rather than classroom practices. The solutions, or recommendations, proposed are intended to ensure that policies align with the best interests of students, parents, and taxpayers rather than with those of the service providers.

The 21st century is steeped in claims to interconnection, technological innovation, and new affective intensities amid challenges to the primacy and centrality of "the human". Flashpoint epistemology attends to the lived difficulties that arise in teaching, policymaking, curriculum, and research among continuous practices of differentiation, and for which there is no pre-existing template for judgment, resolution, or action. Flashpoint Epistemology Volume 1 examines contemporary collisions and reworkings of cultural-political issues in education through arts and humanities-based approaches. How and whether lines are (re)drawn in educational practice – and via who-what – between justice, morality, religion, ethics, subjectivities, intersectionality, the sublime, and the senses are a particular focus. The volume offers innovative relational approaches and new narrativization strategies, examining the aporia experienced when operating in educational domains of inevitable, recurring, difficult, fortuitous, and/or unforeseen flashpoints. The chapters will engage researchers seeking new approaches to education’s complexities, nested discourses, and ever-moving horizons of enactment. It will also benefit post/graduate students and teachers whose work intersects with sociological, philosophical, and cultural studies and who are curious about claims to interconnection, the ethical quandaries embedded in practice, and the affordances and limits of technological innovation.

Teaching a Dark Chapter explores how textbook narratives about the Fascist/Nazi past in Italy, East Germany, and West Germany followed relatively calm, undisturbed paths of little change until isolated "flashpoints" catalyzed the educational infrastructure into periods of rapid transformation. Though these flashpoints varied among Italy and the Germanys, they all roughly conformed to a chronological scheme and permanently changed how each "dark past" was represented. Historians have often neglected textbooks as sources in their engagement with the reconstruction of postfascist states and the development of postwar memory culture. But as Teaching a Dark Chapter demonstrates, textbooks yield new insights and suggest a new chronology of the changes in postwar memory culture that other sources overlook. Employing a methodological and temporal rethinking of the narratives surrounding the development of European Holocaust memory, Daniela R. P. Weiner reveals how, long before 1968, textbooks in these three countries served as important tools to influence public memory about Nazi/Fascist atrocities. As Fascism had been spread through education, then education must play a key role in undoing the damage. Thus, to repair and shape postwar societies, textbooks became an avenue to inculcate youths with desirable democratic and socialist values. Teaching a Dark Chapter weds the historical study of public memory with the educational study of textbooks to ask how and why the textbooks were created, what they said, and how they affected the society around them.

Emerging from mid-century social movements, Civil Rights Era formations, and anti-war protests, Asian American studies is now an established field of transnational inquiry, diasporic engagement, and rights activism. These histories and origin points analogously serve as initial moorings for Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, a collection that considers–almost fifty years after its student protest founding--the possibilities of and limitations inherent in Asian American studies as historically entrenched, politically embedded, and institutionally situated interdiscipline. Unequivocally, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies investigates the multivalent ways in which the field has at times and—more provocatively, has not—responded to various contemporary crises, particularly as they are manifest in prevailing racist, sexist, homophobic, and exclusionary politics at home, ever-expanding imperial and militarized practices abroad, and neoliberal practices in higher education.