The result is this extraordinary and eye-opening book. Told by real people in their own words, the stories inside are at turns harrowing, heartbreaking, and full of hope.You can have a copy of this book, for free, by visiting www.bigshouldersbooks.com.

    It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.

    In Urban Injustice, he explains in beautiful and simple language how the myth that the urban poor siphon off precious government resources is contradicted by the facts, and how most programs help some of the people some of the time but are almost never sufficiently orchestrated to enable people to escape the cycle of urban poverty. Hilfiker is able to present a surprising history of poverty programs since the New Deal, and shows that many of the biggest programs were extremely successful at attaining the goals set out for them. Even so, Hilfiker reveals, most of the best and biggest programs were "social insurance" programs, like Medicare and Social Security, that primarily assisted the middle class, not the poor. Whereas, "public assistance" programs, directed specifically towards the poor, were often extremely effective as far as they went, but were instituted with far less ambitious goals. In a book that is short, sweet, and completely without academic verboseness or pretension, Hilfiker makes a clear path through the complex history of societal poverty, the obvious weaknesses and surprising strengths of societal responses to poverty thus far, and offers an analysis of models of assistance from around the world that might perhaps assist us in making a better world for our children once we decide that is what we must do.

    Cris Tovani is an accomplished teacher and staff developer who writes with verve and humor about the challenges of working with students at all levels of achievement—from those who have mastered the art of "fake reading" to college-bound juniors and seniors who struggle with the different demands of content-area textbooks and novels.Enter Cris' classroom, a place where students are continually learning new strategies for tackling difficult text. You will be taken step-by-step through practical, theory-based reading instruction that can be adapted for use in any subject area. The book features:anecdotes in each chapter about real kids with real universal problems. You will identify with these adolescents and will see how these problems can be solved;a thoughtful explanation of current theories of comprehension instruction and how they might be adapted for use with adolescents;a What Works section in each of the last seven chapters that offers simple ideas you can immediately employ in your classroom. The suggestions can be used in a variety of content areas and grade levels(6-12);teaching tips and ideas that benefit struggling readers as well as proficient and advanced readers;appendixes with reproducible materials that you can use in your classroom, including coding sheets, double entry diaries, and comprehension constructors.In a time when students need increasingly sophisticated reading skills, this book will provide support for teachers who want to incorporate comprehension instruction into their daily lesson plans without sacrificing content knowledge.

    A predicament arises, and the children's response--simple and immediate--offers Paley the purest evidence of kindness she has ever seen.In subsequent encounters, "the Teddy story" draws forth other tales of impulsive goodness from Paley's listeners. Just so, it resonates through this book as one story leads to another--taking surprising turns, intersecting with the narrative unfolding before us, and illuminating the moral meanings that children may be learning to create among themselves.Paley's journey takes us into the different worlds of urban London, Chicago, Oakland, and New York City, and to a close-knit small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Her own story connects those of children from nursery school to high school, and circles back to her elderly mother, whose experiences as a frightened immigrant girl, helped through a strange school and a new language by another child, reappear in the story of a young Mexican American girl. Thus the book quietly brings together the moral life of the very young and the very old. With her characteristic unpretentious charm, Paley lets her listeners and storytellers take us down unexpected paths, where the meeting of story and real life make us wonder: Are children wiser about the nature of kindness than we think they are?

    So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord.Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge.Blueprint for Disaster, then, is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

    When racist curriculum "goes viral" on social media it is typically dismissed as an isolated incident from a bad teacher. Picower, however, holds that racist curriculum isn't an anomaly. It's a systemic problem that reflects how whiteness is embedded and reproduced in education. Drawing on her experience teaching and developing the Newark Teacher Project--a project that pairs pre-service teachers students with mentors who focus on social justice and antiracist professional development--she demonstrates how individual teacher's ideology of race, consciously or unconsciously, shapes how they teach race in the classroom and reinforce racial hierarchies in the younger generation. She argues that white teachers must reframe their understanding about race in order to advance racial justice, and this must begin in teacher education programs. With a focus on institutional strategies, Picower shows how racial justice can be built into programs across the teacher education pipeline--from admission to induction. By examining the who, what, why and how of racial justice teacher education, she provides radical possibilities for transforming teacher education.

    The police are waging a war on Black people. “White privilege” means minorities never get a fair shake. Although this narrative of oppression is demonstrably fictitious, it is taboo to question it, and those who do so risk being labeled racist or sexist themselves. America needs an honest conversation based on common sense and cold, hard facts. Honesty and respect for the facts are the specialty of Wilfred Reilly, the celebrated author of Hate Crime Hoax. In Taboo, he fearlessly examines ten forbidden truths that have been buried by political correctness. They include: -The Black rate of violent crime is roughly 2.5 times the white rate. When demographic variables are taken into account, there are no racial differences in the rate of police-involved shootings. -Interracial crime is remarkably rare, but 75 to 80 percent of it occurs against white people. -Minorities can be racist—take the Nation of Islam, which holds that white people are an inferior race created by a Black scientist. -Disparities between racial groups in IQ testing and SAT performance are the result of cultural variables, such as the presence of a father in the home, not racism. Reilly goes where most social scientists fear to tread, using objective statistics and common sense to tackle taboo topics. Taboo is an essential takedown of the lies you hear every day from ideological activists and lazy, biased media.

    The recent experience of the Democratic primaries and the re-emergence of social movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter has generated a new context for identity politics to become an active force, and new ground to relitigate the frustrating debates between the partisans of "race" and "class" ad infinitum. In Mistaken Identity, Asad Haider reaches for a different approach - one rooted in the rich legacies of the black freedom struggle. Drawing from the words and deeds of black revolutionary theorists, he argues that identity politics is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralization of its movements, a retreat from the crucial passage from identity to solidarity, and from individual recognition to collective struggle against an oppressive social structure. Mistaken Identity is an urgent call for alternative visions, languages, and practices against the white identity politics of right-wing populism. Responding with a contrary, pluralist identity politics has proven successful. The idea of universal emancipation now seems old-fashioned and outmoded. But if we are attentive to the lines of struggle which lie outside the boundaries of the state, we will see that it has been placed on the agenda once again.

    It looks at what it means to be a teacher and a student in urban America, and deals with the critical moral issues teachers must face.

    It ensures that learners consistently make great progress over time, and offers a practical, hands-on manual for teachers to further develop their attitudes, skills and habits of excellence both for themselves and for their learners.

    Bumper to Bumper is newer, longer, and better, touting mostly original stories that include the time Doug crashed his brand-new Porsche company car into a tree, the real story behind the time Doug crushed a Chrysler PT Cruiser, the time Doug bribed a government official in South Africa, the time Doug got detained at the Canadian border on an automotive press trip, and the story of Doug’s relationship with automakers. Also, Doug wrote this description himself in the third person.

    This peacemaking practice draws on the ancient Native American tradition of a talking piece and combines that with concepts of democracy and inclusivity.Peacemaking circles are used in neighborhoods to provide support for those harmed by crime and to decide sentences for those who commit crime, in schools to create positive classroom climates and resolve behavior problems, in the workplace to deal with conflict, and in social services to develop more organic support systems for people struggling to get their lives together. The circle process hinges on storytelling. It is an effort bringing astonishing results around the country. Chapters include:Circles in PracticeA Circle Story—Finding a Way to Move Forward after a Workers StrikeFoundations of CirclesA Circle Story—Finding Understanding in the ClassroomKey Elements of CirclesA Circle Story—Finding Healing from Violent CrimeOrganizing a Talking CircleA Circle Story—Finding Respect Across GenerationsCircles in PerspectiveA Circle Story—Finding Connection within FamilyA title in The Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding Series.

       An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and healthcare. Holmes’s material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the U.S., planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of how health equity is undermined by a normalization of migrant suffering, the natural endpoint of systemic dehumanization, exploitation, and oppression that clouds any sense of empathy for “invisible workers.”  Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is far more than an ethnography or supplementary labor studies text; Holmes tells the stories of food production workers from as close to the ground as possible, revealing often theoretically-discussed social inequalities as irreparable bodily damage done. This book substantiates the suffering of those facing the danger of crossing the border, threatened with deportation, or otherwise caught up in the structural violence of a system promising work but endangering or ignoring the human rights and health of its workers.All of the book award money and royalties from the sales of this book have been donated to farm worker unions, farm worker organizations and farm worker projects in consultation with farm workers who appear in the book.

    In this slim volume, Zinn lays out a clear and dynamic case for civil disobedience and protest, and challenges the dominant arguments against forms of protest that challenge the status quo. Zinn explores the politics of direct action, nonviolent civil disobedience, and strikes, and draws lessons for today.