Based on an examination of four school districts facing the prospect of court-ordered detracking, Legal Rights, Local Wrongs challenges fundamental assumptions about the opportunities for equity-minded educational reform. Welner studied districts across the country in San Jose, California; Wilmington, Delaware; Woodland Hills, Pennsylvania; and Rockford, Illinois. These case studies show how white upper middle class parents exercised a disproportionate amount of power in local school policy making, and how that power was wielded to hinder reform opportunities intended to benefit low-income students of color. He shows how many school reforms must arise and develop within cauldrons of political interests and conflicting values and beliefs. This reform context is very different from the politically neutral environments presupposed by conventional school change literature. The book's political and normative focus accordingly examines the least often addressed—and yet most daunting—obstacles standing between America and the just, equitable schools portrayed in American rhetoric.

Collection of quotations and judicial opinions of federal appellate judge Richard A. Posner

This book explores the historical origins and institutional shape of special education across the American states. It begins with the decade of the 1840s as states anticipated the legislation of compulsory attendance laws. With these laws, the institutional beginnings of special education emerge defined by the exemption of physically and mentally handicapped youth and by the power of schools to exclude juvenile delinquent youth as well. With the passage of these laws states formalized the "rules of access" to a common schooling, thereby structuring the school age population into three segments: the common, delinquent, and special. As the worlds of delinquency and exceptionality progressively encroached upon public schools, their inclusion has been the central force behind the expansion of special education; as a structure of handicapping categories and as a professional field within education generally. This institutional expansion of special education has occurred over the past thirty years, and has reshaped public education by defining the "rules of passage."

Improving public schools through performance-based funding Spurred by court rulings requiring states to increase public-school funding, the United States now spends more per student on K-12 education than almost any other country. Yet American students still achieve less than their foreign counterparts, their performance has been flat for decades, millions of them are failing, and poor and minority students remain far behind their more advantaged peers. In this book, Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth trace the history of reform efforts and conclude that the principal focus of both courts and legislatures on ever-increasing funding has done little to improve student achievement. Instead, Hanushek and Lindseth propose a new approach: a performance-based system that directly links funding to success in raising student achievement. This system would empower and motivate educators to make better, more cost-effective decisions about how to run their schools, ultimately leading to improved student performance. Hanushek and Lindseth have been important participants in the school funding debate for three decades. Here, they draw on their experience, as well as the best available research and data, to show why improving schools will require overhauling the way financing, incentives, and accountability work in public education.

From the Courtroom to the Classroom examines recent developments pertaining to school desegregation in the United States. As the editors note, it comes at a time marked by a “general downplaying of race and ethnicity as criteria for the allocation of public resources, as well as a weakening of the political forces that support busing to achieve racial integration.” The book fills a growing need for a full-scale assessment of this recent history and its effect on schools, children, and communities.

This wide-ranging handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the field of education as viewed from a sociological perspective. Experts in the area present theoretical and empirical research on major educational issues and analyze the social processes that govern schooling, and the role of schools in and their impact on contemporary society. A major reference work for social scientists who want an overview of the field, graduate students, and educators.