Help for kids the education system ignores

Vajra Watson presents compelling community-based approaches to school reform. Drawing on over three years of ethnographic research, Vajra Watson explores the complicated process of reaching and teaching today's students. She reveals how four nontraditional educators successfully empower young people who have repeatedly been left behind. Watson provides key strategies for educators to utilize as they work with at-promise students.

This volume includes incredible articles dealing with race and culture in the classroom. Moving beyond a simplistic focus on heroes and holidays, and foods and festivals, it demonstrates a powerful vision of anti-racist, social justice education. Practical, rich in story, and analytically sharp, Rethinking Multicultural Education reclaims multicultural education as part of a larger struggle for justice and against racism, colonization, and cultural oppression in schools and society.

Lisa Delpit develops ideas about ways teachers can be better "cultural transmitters" in the classroom, where prejudice, stereotypes, and cultural assumptions breed ineffective education. Delpit suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as primarily white teachers and "other people’s children" struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics plaguing our system.

The authors want to turn the conversation about the achievement gap into a conversation about how increasing passion in the classroom can create transformative change in students’ lives.

Boykin and Noguera maintain that it is possible to close the achievement gap by abandoning failed strategies, learning from successful schools, and simply doing more of what the research shows is most effective. Success is founded on equity, but equity involves more than simply ensuring students have equal access to education; equity also entails a focus on outcomes and results.

Hooks writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom.  Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.

Gardner demonstrates the transformative potential of restorative discipline practices in schools, ranging from the micro-level of one-on-one interactions with students to the macro-level of re-routing the school-to-prison pipeline and improving life outcomes for young people. Gardner, who continues to teach high school in Oakland, Ca, has spent nearly 20 years innovating, struggling, and succeeding to implement various restorative justice practices in classrooms and schools around the Bay Area. Using classrooms and schools where he has taught and students, families and educators with whom he has worked, Gardner examines how restorative justice, as a set of beliefs and practices can be a force for justice and equity in our classrooms, schools, and beyond.

PBS News Hour produced a piece on Victor’s story and the work he does with young people

NPR’s On Point produced a show centered on Dr. Rios’ work.

The Mercury News discusses Victor’s work with Educators