Our Children Can't Wait: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America

by Joseph P. Bishop

Overview

Education policies have too often ignored how conditions outside of school can alter life chances for young people, especially students of color, before they even reach the classroom. More recently, COVID-19 has made it impossible to overlook the needs of the whole child, both inside and outside of school. The authors assert that responding to a number of factors like air quality, housing, public health, community safety, segregation, and neighborhood conditions are essential to improving academic outcomes and student health. Our Children Can't Wait urges readers to reconsider what education policy is, what it could be, who it is for, and who should be directly shaping it at all levels of government. Experts present a new equity roadmap by bridging scholarship, ideas, and original thinking on education policy as a vehicle for setting a redemptive path forward for reckoning with race in America.

Book Features:

• Presents a new, evidence-based blueprint for addressing persistent gaps in education opportunity through a number of interrelated social policies.
• Includes contributing authors from 17 organizations and universities, representing a powerful national network of scholars.
• Goes beyond diagnosing or identifying challenges to present solutions in the form of tools and promising models.
• Offers strategies for preventing more students from experiencing homelessness or entering the criminal justice system through strategic investments.
• Addresses timely issues that are in the hearts and minds of many key stakeholders in no small part due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807781104
Publisher:	Teachers College Press
Publication date:	11/25/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Joseph P. Bishop is the executive director of the Center for the Transformation of Schools and teaches education policy in the School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA.

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword Becky Pringle   v

Acknowledgments  vii

1.  Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America  1
Joseph P. Bishop

2.  Grappling With America’s History to Inform Our Future Policies  11
Arnold F. Fege and John H. Jackson

3.  Making Children a National Priority: Overcoming the Marginalization and Invisibility of Children  23
Bruce Lesley

4.  Whose Vision of Racial Equity?: Reinventing Education Policy in Post–Civil Rights America  41
Sonya Douglass and Anna Kushner

5.  Developing Policy for the Whole Child  58
Linda Darling-Hammond and Channa Mae Cook

6.  Starting in School: Education Policies to Dismantle Systemic Racism  76
Tyrone C. Howard

7.  Youths’ Health and Learning Connection  92
Alexandra Mays and Rochelle Davis

8.  Air Pollution, Exposure to Contaminants, and Education Policy  109
Sara Grineski and Timothy Collins

9.  Promoting Equity and Justice Through Integrated Schools and Communities  133
Jennifer B. Ayscue and Erica Frankenberg

10.  Housing Strategies as Education Policy  154
Megan Gallagher

11.  Reimagining School Safety During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Call for Policy Strategies to Address Racial and Social Justice  174
Heather M. Reynolds and Ron Avi Astor

12.  Toward Transformative Justice in School Finance  194
Oscar Jiménez-Castellanos, Danielle Farrie, and David M. Quinn

13.  Youth Wildin’ in the (Re)Shaping of Policy: Toward a Critical Model of Racial Justice and Community Accountability  212
Justin A. Coles, Keisha L. Green, and Jamila Lyiscott

14.  Youth Incarceration and Education Policy  232
Angela James

15.  Students Experiencing Homelessness: A National Crisis  251
Matthew H. Morton, Earl J. Edwards, and Melissa Kull

16.  Bringing the Vision Together: How to Reach the Policies We Need  269
Joseph P. Bishop

About the Contributors  281

Index  285

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Our Children Can’t Wait should serve as a wake-up call to policymakers, philanthropists, and others who support education and have worked to bring about its improvement. For too long, we have relied on policies that narrowly focus on raising student achievement. Meanwhile, the factors that affect the health and well-being of children have often been ignored. This book provides evidence from a variety of fields to show us why a broader, bolder, and more comprehensive approach to child development and school improvement is needed. With chapters written by a collection of scholars from a variety of disciplines, this book provides the blueprint for creating new policies at the local, state, and federal levels that can really make a difference for our children.”
—Pedro A. Noguera, Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California

“Joseph Bishop's edited volume is a who's who of education policy scholars. It is both timely and will prove to be timeless for our country's next generation of education policymakers.”
—Travis J. Bristol, associate professor, University of California, Berkeley

“Our Children Can’t Wait is the right book at the right time. It provides an unapologetically clear-eyed view at the way in which racism has shaped both our nation and its public school system, and supplies detailed roadmaps for navigating the way forward, toward a future in which every student—Black, White, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, LGBTQ+ and differently abled—can step boldly into their brilliance.”
—From the Foreword by Becky Pringle, president, National Education Association

“Justice in policy for the future depends on a nimble and intersectional understanding of everyday constraints and challenges faced by people of color in our country that are themselves artifacts of our nation’s vexed and fraught relationship to these communities. Kudos to Joseph Bishop for this bold and visionary anthology that calls out white supremacy while charting an imaginative, comprehensive, and solutions-based path forward.”
—Angela Valenzuela, professor, University of Texas at Austin

“Our Children Can’t Wait is an extraordinary compilation of thought-provoking analysis, evaluation, and diagnosis of the nation’s public education system and policies, and the inequities in it that persist. The authors go an important step forward and present practical and evidence-based solutions and remedies so that our children can experience the promise of a high-quality, equitable education.”
—Arturo Vargas, executive director, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund

“This book demonstrates why our children can’t wait for transformative policies during these troubling times of partisan politics designed to maintain an inequitable status quo. Grounded in the best of what we know from empirical evidence, the authors in this contextually situated and action-oriented book chart an agenda forward with fresh, insightful, and bold policy recommendations that could make a powerful difference in the lives of those on the margins. A collection of essays from some of the leading thinkers in education and beyond focused on what is necessary to improve educational processes and outcomes, this book is a resource for any of us serious about the work of co-constructing and co-enacting opportunity policy and practice in the fight for social justice.”
—H. Richard Milner, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Education, Vanderbilt University

“Innovating schooling at scale is an exceptionally difficult problem because it involves changing not simply practices and structures but educators’ understanding of how people learn and develop under different conditions, and community stakeholders’ beliefs and feelings about school and achievement. This wide-ranging volume explains from multiple perspectives the relationships among priorities, beliefs, and resources in education, and how policy can be leveraged to shift the landscape in which schooling takes place.”
—Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Fahmy and Donna Attallah Chair in Humanistic Psychology, University of Southern California

“The long road to reinventing education policy has been littered with singular fixes and flavors of the moment. This book is the destination, where the full needs of students are met. The wide-ranging expertise of the contributors serves to create a collection of years’ worth of thought, experience, research, and commitment to ending that wait.”
—Joyce Elliott, Arkansas State Senator, former public school teacher

Editorial Reviews

(A) powerful compilation of essays highlighting the urgent need to address the systemic barriers that disadvantaged children face.”

—NASSP Principal Leadership

“Offers a critically relevant discussion of educational policy in the U.S. in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and its exposure of the inadequacies of the current landscape of education. With contributions from such authors as Linda Darling-Hammond, Tyrone Howard, Justin Coles, Jamila Lyiscott, and Timothy Collins, this volume is interdisciplinary and touches on a range of topics…Recommended.”

—CHOICE

From the Publisher