Responding to the conservative agenda of high-stakes testing, charter schools, and vouchers, "Pockets of Hope" offers an alternative vision of education reform. It provides an intimate portrayal of day-to-day teaching and learning in six educational projects that span both classroom and community-based settings, thereby giving readers a genuine understanding of the possibilities inherent in democratic education.

The six projects examined herein demonstrate the ways in which education can be an empowering experience for students, providing them with the academic, social, and political...

Politics, language, and culture are three of the most powerful forces affecting education today, yet they have been little discussed in relation to systemic school reform, the new status quo of urban schools. This book looks at their effects through the eyes of teachers, administrators, and insider/outsiders who are actually living reform at the school level in four widely different urban school systems: Chicago, San Francisco and Oakland, California, and Boston. The book also creates a statistical and conceptual picture of urban education and school reform as national phenomena with deep...

For all peoples on all continents and for all times, water has been the blood of life. It is fitting then, that this book about the peoples of the Southwest be dedicated to an examination of water in a land that has historically been dry, making the need to locate water supplies essential. The Southwest became an important frontier for Spanish and then Anglo explorers and colonizers who battled with native occupants for strategic locations. Each one of these groups who made the Southwest their home were ethnically quite different. They represented diverse histories, cultures,...