The full-scale assault on public education threatens not just public education but American democracy itself. Public education as we know it is in trouble. Derek W. Black, a legal scholar and tenacious advocate, shows how major democratic and constitutional developments are intimately linked to the expansion of public education throughout American history. Schoolhouse Burningis grounded in pathbreaking, original research into how the nation, in its infancy, built itself around public education and, following the Civil War, enshrined education as a constitutional right that forever changed the trajectory of our democracy. Public education, alongside the right to vote, was the cornerstone of the recovery of the war-torn nation. Today's current schooling trends -- the declining commitment to properly fund public education and the well-financed political agenda to expand vouchers and charter schools -- present a major assault on the democratic norms that public education represents and risk undermining one of the unique accomplishments of American society.

Kashmir is burning in the wake of terrorist activities, stone-pelting mobs and life-crippling curfews. Homes and schools have been burnt to the ground. The government is looking the other way, locals are frustrated, and the youth have gone astray. In the midst of this is the mammoth task of coaching deserving students to help them crack one of the toughest exams in the country, the IIT entrance. Too many hurdles and too less time. Who would be foolish enough to take up the challenge at a time like this?Enter Naved Baig from Lucknow, an IIM graduate and an innovative thinker; a person armed with the blazing desire to dismantle the existing network of ignorance and terror in the valley. Will he succeed? Will he beat a hasty retreat? OR Will he meet a gruesome end at the hands of evil?Come into the world where police officer's ambitions and militant rage come face to face with rugged determination and unconditional love. Find how the power of ONE can set things right for a deviant group of kids with innocence lost and revolutionise even the most negative of mindsets.The Burning School is a story about how good education, purity of thought and self-discovery can help fight for freedom from the demons of the mind and finally make one emerge victorious.

"Adam Rapp’s brilliant and haunting story will break your heart. But then his words will mend it. . . . Absolutely unforgettable." – Michael Cart On the run in a stolen car with a kidnapped baby in tow, Custis, Curl, and Boobie are three young people with deeply troubled pasts and bleak futures. As they struggle to find a new life for themselves, it becomes painfully clear that none of them will ever be able to leave the past behind. Yet for one, redemption is waiting in the unlikeliest of places. With the raw language of the street and lyrical, stream-of-consciousness prose, Adam Rapp hurtles the reader into a world of lost children, a world that is not for the faint of heart. Gripping, disturbing, and starkly illuminating, his hypnotic narration captures the voices of two damaged souls - a third speaks only through drawings - to tell a story of alienation, deprivation, and ultimately, the saving power of compassion.

Kashmir is burning in the wake of terrorist activities, stone-pelting mobs and life-crippling curfews. Homes and schools have been burnt to the ground. The government is looking the other way, locals are frustrated, and the youth have gone astray. In the midst of this is the mammoth task of coaching deserving students to help them crack one of the toughest exams in the country, the IIT entrance. Too many hurdles and too less time. Who would be foolish enough to take up the challenge at a time like this? Enter Naved Baig from Lucknow, an IIM graduate and an innovative thinker; a person armed with the blazing desire to dismantle the existing network of ignorance and terror in the valley. Will he succeed? Will he beat a hasty retreat? OR Will he meet a gruesome end at the hands of evil? Come into the world where police officer's ambitions and militant rage come face to face with rugged determination and unconditional love. Find how the power of ONE can set things right for a deviant group of kids with innocence lost and revolutionise even the most negative of mindsets. The Burning School is a story about how good education, purity of thought and self-discovery can help fight for freedom from the demons of the mind and finally make one emerge victorious.

A compelling dual-narrated tale from Jennifer Latham that questions how far we've come with race relations. Some bodies won't stay buried. Some stories need to be told. When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family's property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the present and the past. Nearly one hundred years earlier, a misguided violent encounter propels seventeen-year-old Will Tillman into a racial firestorm. In a country rife with violence against blacks and a hometown segregated by Jim Crow, Will must make hard choices on a painful journey towards self discovery and face his inner demons in order to do what's right the night Tulsa burns. Through intricately interwoven alternating perspectives, Jennifer Latham's lightning-paced page-turner brings the Tulsa race riot of 1921 to blazing life and raises important questions about the complex state of US race relations--both yesterday and today.

"A smart, explosive examination of gender discrimination and its ramifications." — Publishers Weekly From Laura Bates, internationally renowned feminist and founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, comes a realistic novel for the #metoo era. The Burning will prompt all readers to consider the implications of sexism and the role we can each play in ending it What happens when you can't run or hide from a mistake that goes viral? New school. Check. New town. Check. New last name. Check. Social media profiles? Deleted. Anna and her mother have moved hundreds of miles to put the past behind them. Anna hopes to make a fresh start and escape the harassment she's been subjected to. But then rumors and whispers start, and Anna tries to ignore what is happening by immersing herself in learning about Maggie, a local woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century. A woman who was shamed. Silenced. And whose story has unsettling parallels to Anna's own. The Burning is a powerful call to action, perfect for readers looking for: feminist novels for teens young adult realistic fiction books contemporary novels with historical fiction elements books that deal with current events and issues Praise for The Burning: "A haunting rallying cry against sexism and bullying." —Kirkus Reviews "Emotionally charged...powerful." —Booklist "A painfully realistic, spellbinding novel." —Shelf Awareness "Bates's twist on a cautionary tale will take readers on an emotional roller coaster". —School Library Journal

This is a tale of courage, faith, wisdom, tragedy, and perseverance in a small fishing hamlet called Tobay Life at the peaceful fishing hamlet of Tobay has been changed beyond recognition by the power-hungry Abbas, who uses threats and violence to fulfill his desire for control. Will the villagers' faith, courage, and wisdom be enough to win the battle and save their way of life?

On the morning of March 5, 1959, Luvenia Long was listening to gospel music when a news bulletin interrupted her radio program. Fire had engulfed the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, thirteen miles outside of Little Rock. Her son Lindsey had been confined there since January 14, after a judge for juveniles found him guilty of stealing from a neighborhood store owner. To her horror, Lindsey was not among the forty-eight boys who had clawed their way through the windows of the dormitory to safety. Instead, he was among the twenty-one boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen who burned to death. Black Boys Burning presents a focused explanation of how systemic poverty perpetuated by white supremacy sealed the fate of those students. A careful telling of the history of the school and fire, the book provides readers a fresh understanding of the broad implications of white supremacy. Grif Stockley’s research adds to an evolving understanding of the Jim Crow South, Arkansas’s history, the lawyers who capitalized on this tragedy, and the African American victims. In hindsight, the disaster at Wrightsville could have been predicted. Immediately after the fire, an unsigned editorial in the Arkansas Democrat noted long-term deterioration, including the wiring, of the buildings. After the Central High School desegregation crisis in 1957, the boys’ deaths eighteen months later were once again an embarrassment to Arkansas. The fire and its circumstances should have provoked southerners to investigate the realities of their “separate but equal institutions.” However, white supremacy ruled the investigations, and the grand jury declared the event to be an anomaly.

12-16 yrs.

The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.