This unique book provides one of the first and certainly the most practical approach to considering the needs of this population. It addresses important issues such as choice, partnership and community development in order that health promoters can work with and alongside older people to ensure that their health needs are addressed. The text contains numerous examples of good practice and is intentionally interactive, encouraging practitioners to reflect upon and question the assumptions that they make about the health and life-quality expectations for which older people have the potential. Its pragmatic and practical approach encourages the reader to then address these issues in their own practice.The content appeals to a global market as the elderly population increases worldwide Explores attitudes of professionals and older people to their health and to each other Provides practical strategies and approaches Identifies how existing models and theories can be adapted to reflect the changing needs of older people Addresses issues of special relevance including physiological changes, sexual health and mental health

Handbook of Conceptualization and Treatment of Child Psychopathology evaluates and illustrates the integration of conceptualization and treatment of child and adolescent psychopathology. Organized into seven parts, this book first discusses the issues of conceptualization and developmental considerations in treatment. Subsequent part delineates treatment models and specific interventions for disruptive behavior disorders. Parts III-VI elucidate mood, anxiety, eating and substance use disorders. The last part covers firesetting, trichotillomania, elimination disorders, schizophrenia, sleep problems, and dissociative disorders. This handbook is an educational tool for graduate students and a resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, school counselors, social workers, and other mental health practitioners who treat children and adolescents and their families.

It wasn't so long ago that the white working class occupied the middle of British and American societies. But today members of the same demographic, feeling silenced and ignored by mainstream parties, have moved to the political margins. In the United States and the United Kingdom, economic disenfranchisement, nativist sentiments and fear of the unknown among this group have even inspired the creation of new right-wing parties and resulted in a remarkable level of support for fringe political candidates, most notably Donald Trump. Answers to the question of how to rebuild centrist coalitions in both the U.S. and U.K. have become increasingly elusive. How did a group of people synonymous with Middle Britain and Middle America drift to the ends of the political spectrum? What drives their emerging radicalism? And what could possibly lead a group with such enduring numerical power to, in many instances, consider themselves a "minority" in the countries they once defined? In The New Minority, Justin Gest speaks to people living in once thriving working class cities-Youngstown, Ohio and Dagenham, England-to arrive at a nuanced understanding of their political attitudes and behaviors. In this daring and compelling book, he makes the case that tension between the vestiges of white working class power and its perceived loss have produced the unique phenomenon of white working class radicalization.

For the past several years, child advocates, parents, and educators have expressed concern over the sexualization of girls. Has the cultural sexual objectification of girls and women increased? Are younger and younger girls sold a "sexed-up" version of femininity, and are adult women sold a girlish sexuality?
The Sexualization of Girls and Girlhood: Causes, Consequences, and Resistance includes the best empirical research, theory, and practice stemming from the report of the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Contributors discuss evidence for this phenomenon from media and marketing, to interpersonal interaction, to girls' own efforts to fashion themselves after sexualized role models around them. A variety of consequences of the sexualization of girls and girlhood--for girls themselves, for others, and for society at large--are presented. Individual chapters cover topics such as athletics as a solution and problem for the sexualization of girls, sexual harassment by peers, gendered violence, body image, adolescent girls' sexual development, and healthy sexuality for girls and young women. Importantly, positive alternatives and suggestions are included so that those who care for girls can address this troubling cultural trend and help counter the significant risk to girls' wellbeing that it represents. This volume is a valuable resource for child advocates, parents, and educators and useful for undergraduate and graduate courses that address gender across disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, communication, media studies, and women's, and sexuality studies.

The city is a paradoxical space, in theory belonging to everyone, in practice inaccessible to people who cannot afford the high price of urban real estate. Within these urban spaces are public and social goods including roads, policing, transit, public education, and culture, all of which have been created through multiple hands and generations, but that are effectively only for the use of those able to acquire private property. Why should this be the case? As Margaret Kohn argues, when people lose access to the urban commons, they are dispossessed of something to which they have a rightful claim - the right to the city. Political theory has much to say about individual rights, equality, and redistribution, but it has largely ignored the city. In response, Kohn turns to a mostly forgotten political theory called solidarism to interpret the city as a form of common-wealth. In this view, the city is a concentration of value created by past generations and current residents: streets, squares, community centers, schools and local churches. Although the legal title to these mixed spaces includes a patchwork of corporate, private, and public ownership, if we think of the spaces as the common-wealth of many actors, the creation of a new framework of value becomes possible. Through its novel mix of political and urban theory, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth proposes a productive way to rethink struggles over gentrification, public housing, transit, and public space.

This second volume in the series presents a coherent set of papers that deal with the challenges of leveraging information technology for designing inter-organizational relationships. Instead of assembling a set of papers that are loosely connected to the broad theme of strategy and information technology, this volume presents a well-knit compendium of papers on a coherent topic.

American society has been long plagued by cycles of racial violence, most dramatically in the 1960s when hundreds of ghetto uprisings erupted across American cities. Though the larger, underlying causes of contentious race relations have remained the same, the lethality, intensity, and outcomes of these urban rebellions have varied widely. What accounts for these differences? And what lessons can be learned that might reduce the destructive effects of riots and move race relations forward?
This impressive, meticulously detailed study is the first attempt to compare six major race riots that occurred in the three largest American urban areas during the course of the twentieth century: in Chicago in 1919 and 1968; in New York in 1935/1943 and 1964; and in Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992. Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles weaves together detailed narratives of each riot, placing them in their changing historical contexts and showing how urban space, political regimes, and economic conditions--not simply an abstract "race conflict"--have structured the nature and extent of urban rebellions. Building on her previous groundbreaking comparative history of these three cities, Janet Abu-Lughod draws upon archival research, primary sources, case studies, and personal observations to reconstruct events--especially for the 1964 Harlem-Bedford Stuyvesant uprising and Chicago's 1968 riots where no documented studies are available. By focusing on the similarities and differences in each city, identifying the unique and persisting issues, and evaluating the ways political leaders, law enforcement, and the local political culture have either defused or exacerbated urbanviolence, this book points the way toward alleviating long-standing ethnic and racial tensions.
A masterful analysis from a renowned urbanist, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles offers a deeper understanding of past--and future--urban race relations while emphasizing that until persistent racial and economic inequalities are meaningfully resolved, the tensions leading to racial violence will continue to exist in America's cities and betray our professed democratic values.

Urban ethnography is one of the oldest traditions of American social science and has helped define how we think about cities and city dwellers since its inception in the early twentieth century. Renewed interest in urban poverty, the immigrant experience, and gentrification among the public and scholars alike has focused attention on qualitative methods in the social sciences, and the field of urban ethnography in particular receives more attention now than at any point since its inception. The Urban Ethnography Reader assembles the very best of American ethnographic writing, from classic works to contemporary research, and aims to present ethnography as social science, social history, and literature alongside its traditional place as methodology. In addition to an original introduction that highlights the importance and development of the field, Kasinitz, Duneier, and Murphy also provide introductions to each section of the book. The section introductions will cover the period's historical events and how they influenced the study of the city, the major themes and preoccupations of ethnography, what was happening in the social sciences as a whole, and how the excerpts chosen fit into the larger work in which they were originally published. A valuable companion to a wide range of courses on cities across the social sciences, The Urban Ethnography Reader captures the diversity, the historical development, and the continuing importance of the ethnographic approach to understanding American communities.

This study explores the dynamic relations between cultural forms and political formations in some urban cultural movements. The analysis is based on a detailed study of the structure and development of the London Notting Hill Carnival, widely described as Europe's biggest street festival. Started in 1966 as a small-scale, multi-ethnic local festival, it grew into a massive West-Indian dominated affair that over the years occasioned violent confrontations between black youth and the police. The carnival developed and mobilized a homogenous and communal West-Indian culture that helped in the struggle against rampant racism. The celebration is contrasted with other carnival movements, such as California's 'Renaissance Pleasure Faire'. Analytically, this is a follow-up to Cohen's earlier studies of the relations between drama and politics in some urban religious, ethnic and elitist movements in Africa. The conclusion focuses on the processes underlying the transformation of rational political strategies into non-rational cultural forms.

Based in the idea that social phenomena are best studied through the lens of different disciplinary perspectives, Empty Churches studies the growing number of individuals who no longer affiliate with a religious tradition. Co-editors Jan Stets, a social psychologist, and James Heft, a historian of theology, bring together leading scholars in the fields of sociology, developmental psychology, gerontology, political science, history, philosophy, and pastoral theology. The scholars in this volume explore the phenomenon by drawing from each other's work to understand better the multi-faceted nature of non-affiliation today. They explore the complex impact that non-affiliation has on individuals and the wider society, and what the future looks like for religion in America. The book also features insightful perspectives from parents of young adults and interviews with pastors struggling with this issue who address how we might address this trend. Empty Churches provides a rich and thoughtful analysis on non- affiliation in American society from multiple scholarly perspectives. The increasing growth of non-affiliation threatens the vitality and long-term stability of religious institutions, and this book offers guidance on maintaining the commitment and community at the heart of these institutions.

Combining vivid ethnographic storytelling and incisive theoretical analysis, New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism introduces readers to the fascinating and unexplored terrain of neo-monastic evangelicalism. Often located in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, new monastic communities pursue religiously inspired visions of racial, social, and economic justice-alongside personal spiritual transformation-through diverse and creative expressions of radical community For most of the last century, popular and scholarly common-sense has equated American evangelicalism with across-the-board social, economic, and political conservatism. However, if a growing chorus of evangelical leaders, media pundits, and religious scholars is to be believed, the era of uncontested evangelical conservatism is on the brink of collapse-if it hasn't collapsed already. Wes Markofski has immersed himself in the paradoxical world of evangelical neo-monasticism, focusing on the Urban Monastery-an influential neo-monastic community located in a gritty, racially diverse neighborhood in a major Midwestern American city. The resulting account of the way in which the movement is transforming American evangelicalism challenges entrenched stereotypes and calls attention to the dynamic diversity of religious and political points of view which vie for supremacy in the American evangelical subculture. New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism is the first sociological analysis of new monastic evangelicalism and the first major work to theorize the growing theological and political diversity within twenty-first-century American evangelicalism.

Indigenous societies that are steeped in patriarchy have various channels through which they deal with abusive characteristics of relations in some of these communities. One such route is through songs, which sanction women to voice that which, bound by societal expectations, they would not normally be able to say. This book focuses on the nature of women’s contemporary songs in the rural community of Zwelibomvu, near Pinetown in KwaZulu-Natal. It aims to answer the question ‘Bahlabelelelani – Why do they sing?’, drawing on a variety of discourses of gender and power to examine the content and purposes of the songs.

Restricted by the custom of hlonipha, women resort to allusive language, such as is found in ukushoza, a song genre that includes poetic elements and solo dance songs. Other contexts include women’s social events, such as ilima, which refers to the collective activity that takes place when a group of women come together to assist another woman to complete a task that is typically carried out by women. During umgcagco (traditional weddings) and umemulo (girls’ coming-of-age ceremonies), songs befitting the occasion are performed. And neighbouring communities come together at amacece to perform according to izigodi (districts), where local maskandi women groups may be found performing for a goat or cow stake.

The songs, when read in conjunction with the interviews and focus group discussions, present a complex picture of women’s lives in contemporary rural KwaZulu-Natal, and they offer their own commentary on what it means to be a woman in this society.

In the popular imagination, the Caribbean islands represent tropical paradise. This image, which draws millions of tourists to the region annually, underlies the efforts of many environmentalists to protect Caribbean coral reefs, mangroves, and rainforests. However, a dark side to Caribbean environmentalism lies beyond the tourist's view in urban areas where the islands' poorer citizens suffer from exposure to garbage, untreated sewage, and air pollution. Concrete Jungles explores the reasons why these issues tend to be ignored, demonstrating how mainstream environmentalism reflects and reproduces class and race inequalities. Based on over a decade of research in Kingston, Jamaica and Willemstad, Curacao, Rivke Jaffe contrasts the environmentalism of largely middle-class professionals with the environmentalism of inner-city residents. The book combines a sophisticated discussion of the politics of difference with rich ethnographic detail, including vivid depictions of Caribbean ghettos and elite enclaves. Jaffe also extends her analysis beyond ethnographic research, seeking to understand the role of colonial history in shaping the current trends in pollution and urban space. A thorough analysis of the hidden inequalities of mainstream environmentalism, Concrete Jungles provides a political ecology of urban pollution with significant implications for the future of environmentalism.

In the Americas, debates around issues of citizen's public safety-from debates that erupt after highly publicized events, such as the shootings of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, to those that recurrently dominate the airwaves in Latin America-are dominated by members of the middle and upper-middle classes. However, a cursory count of the victims of urban violence in the Americas reveals that the people suffering the most from violence live, and die, at the lowest of the socio-symbolic order, at the margins of urban societies. However, the inhabitants of the urban margins are hardly ever heard in discussions about public safety. They live in danger but the discourse about violence and risk belongs to, is manufactured and manipulated by, others-others who are prone to view violence at the urban margins as evidence of a cultural, or racial, defect, rather than question violence's relationship to economic and political marginalization. As a result, the experience of interpersonal violence among the urban poor becomes something unspeakable, and the everyday fear and trauma lived in relegated territories is constantly muted and denied. This edited volume seeks to counteract this pernicious tendency by putting under the ethnographic microscope-and making public-the way in which violence is lived and acted upon in the urban peripheries. It features cutting-edge ethnographic research on the role of violence in the lives of the urban poor in South, Central, and North America, and sheds light on the suffering that violence produces and perpetuates, as well as the individual and collective responses that violence generates, among those living at the urban margins of the Americas.

Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku made a vow to smile every day and now believes he is the ‘happiest man on earth’. In his inspirational memoir, he pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story and sharing his wisdom.

Life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful. It is up to you.

Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, a Jew second. He was proud of his country. But all of that changed in November 1938, when he was beaten, arrested and taken to a concentration camp.

Over the next seven years, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors every day, first in Buchenwald, then in Auschwitz, then on a Nazi death march. He lost family, friends, his country.

The Happiest Man on Earth is a powerful, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful memoir of how happiness can be found even in the darkest of times.

In an era in which class divisions are becoming starker than ever, some individuals are choosing to marry across class.The Power of the Past traces the lives of a subset of these individuals - highly-educated adults who married a partner raised in a class different from their own, primarily between those from blue- and white-color backgrounds. Drawing upon detailed interviews with spouses who revealed the inner workings of their marriages, Jessi Streib shows that crossing class lines is not easy, and that even though these couples shared bank accounts, mortgages, children, and friends, each spouse was still shaped by the class of their past, and consequently, so was their marriage. Streib reveals what was rarely apparent to the husbands and wives she interviewed. The class of their past did not only matter in determining the amount of money they had as children or what job their parents went off to each morning; It also mattered in more subtle ways, by systematically shaping their ideas of how to go about their daily lives. Upwardly mobile spouses who grew up in blue-collar families learned to take a laissez-faire approach to the world around them: they preferred to go with the flow, make the most of the moment, and avoid self-imposed constraints. Their spouses, who grew up in professional white-collar families, however, wanted to manage the world around them: they organized, planned, monitored, and oversaw. Living with a spouse who was born into a different class means navigating these differences - differences that appeared across nearly every aspect of their lives, from how they manage their finances, to how they manage their time - both at home and on vacation - to ideas about how their children should be raised. The Power of the Past illustrates that when individuals are raised in different classes, merged lives do not lead to merged ideas about how to lead those lives. Individuals can come together across class lines, but their enduring class characteristics cannot be left behind.

There is lots of popular and scholarly concern today about why black students aren't doing better in school. The most popular explanation, the "acting white" thesis, is that they have a culture that rejects achievement-that students' peer cultures hold them back. As Karolyn Tyson convincingly demonstrates, that is not the main or even a central explanation of black academic underachievement. Instead of looking at the students, Tyson argues that when and where students understand race to be connected with achievement, it is a powerful, if indirect, lesson conveyed by schools. Integration Interrupted focuses on the consequences, particularly for black students, of the practice of curriculum tracking in the post-Brown era, and on the relationship between racialized tracking and the emergence of academic excellence as a "white thing." Desegregation may have been officially outlawed over fifty years ago, but race now determines which classes students are in: black students are typically placed in general and remedial classes and whites in advanced classes. In effect, same school, but different schooling. Right after Brown, it was easy to see the deliberate use of tracking to separate kids in schools that courts had mandated integrated. The practice still exists in many schools, though perhaps exercised more subtly, but with same outcome-tracking, including gifted and magnet programs, contributes to distinct racial patterns in achievement. Through ten years of classroom observations and hundreds of interviews with students, parents, and school personnel in thirty schoools, Tyson found that only in very specific circumstances, when black students were drastically underrrepresented in advanced and gifted classes, did anxieties about "the burden of acting white" emerge. But "acting white" is not the only nor the most important consequence of tracking for black students. Tyson reveals how the practice influences high achieving black students' conceptions of racial identity, achievement, and getting ahead; what courses they enroll in, who their friends are, and how they navigate peer pressure with being studious. In short, they face many of the same challenges as white youths face but with significant additional burdens. The rich narratives on the lived experience of black students in Integration Interrupted throw light on the complex relationships underlying the academic performance of black students and convincingly demonstrates that the problem lies not with students, but instead with how we organize our schools.

Intersectionality theory has emerged over the past thirty years as a way to think about the avenues by which inequalities (most often dealing with, but not limited to, race, gender, class and sexuality) are produced. Rather than seeing such categories as signaling distinct identities that can be adopted, imposed or rejected, intersectionality theory considers the logic by which each of these categories is socially constructed as well as how they operate within the diffusion of power relations. In other words, social and political power are conferred through categories of identity, and these identities bear vastly material effects. Rather than look at inequalities as a relationship between those at the center and those on the margins, intersectionality maps the relative ways in which identity politics create power. Though intersectionality theory has emerged as a highly influential school of thought in ethnic studies, gender studies, law, political science, sociology and psychology, no scholarship to date exists on the evolution of the theory. In the absence of a comprehensive intellectual history of the theory, it is often discussed in vague, ahistorical terms. And while scholars have called for greater specificity and attention to the historical foundations of intersectionality theory, their idea of the history to be included is generally limited to the particular currents in the United States. This book seeks to remedy the vagueness and murkiness attributed to intersectionality by attending to the historical, geographical, and cross-disciplinary myopia afflicting current intersectionality scholarship. This comprehensive intellectual history is an agenda-setting work for the theory.

Children's rights and human development is a new and uncharted domain in human rights and psychology research. This multidisciplinary children's rights reader is a first attempt to introduce this domain to students and researchers of children's rights, child development, child maltreatment, family and child studies, and related fields. For many lawyers, children's rights are limited to their legal dimension: the norms and institutions of international human rights law, often with an exclusive focus on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its monitoring treaty body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child. However, there are three more dimensions to children's rights. Children's rights share a moral and a political dimension with all human rights, which most non-international lawyers all too often overlook. And children's rights have a fourth dimension: the time dimension of child and human development. This time dimension is multidisciplinary in itself. Human development begins nine months before childbirth. When we are four years of age, our brain is 90% adult size. The infrastructure of our personality, health, and resilience is formed in our first years of life, determined by the quality and sheer quantity of parent-child interaction and secure attachment formation. Yet, more than one third of children are not securely attached. According to research published in The Lancet in 2009, one in ten children in high income countries is maltreated. Violence against children is a worldwide plague. Socio-economic and socio-emotional deprivation are still transmitted from generation to generation in both rich and poor states. Investing in early childhood development, positive parenting, and child rights education makes sense. This book brings together substantial and fascinating texts from many fields and disciplines that illustrate and elaborate this point. Arranged in ten chapters titled according to pertinent child rights principles and concepts, these texts offer a state-of-the-art view of the enormous progress made in the past decades in several fields of human knowledge. In between these texts, several news and factual items inform the reader on the huge gap that still exists between what we know and what we do to make this world a better place for children, to promote human development, and to protect human rights better. Child rights violations are still met with more rhetoric than leadership. But change is on its way. The book's contents may be used both as background readings and as tasks for group discussion in problem-based learning or other educational settings in child rights law and psychology courses. It is also aimed at a broader academic and public audience interested in the many aspects and ramifications of children's rights and human development.

Questions surrounding 'race' as a spatial divider have come to the forefront of the political agenda, compelling us to revisit the debate on residential segregation. Drawing on the spatial analysis of changing dynamics in the ethnic geography of Greater Glasgow and qualitative research on the residential preferences of 40 South Asian households, this book enhances our understanding of settlement in the city. Understanding Processes of Ethnic Concentration and Dispersal documents new residential patterns, including South Asian suburbanisation in traditionally 'white' areas. Processes underlying both the changes and signs of sustained ethnic concentration are shown to be dynamic and complex. They encompass elements of choice, constraint and negotiations between the two, while also revealing a remarkable array of differentials such as class, status, education, age and culture.

Must the strip mall and the eight-lane highway define 21st century American life? That is a central question posed by critics of suburban and exurban living in America. Yet despite the ubiquity of the critique, it never sticks-Americans by the scores of millions have willingly moved into sprawling developments over the past few decades. Americans find many of the more substantial criticisms of sprawl easy to ignore because they often come across as snobbish in tone. Yet as Thad Williamson explains, sprawl does create real, measurable social problems. Williamson's work is unique in two important ways. First, while he highlights the deleterious effects of sprawl on civic life in America, he is also evenhanded. He does not dismiss the pastoral, homeowning ideal that is at the root of sprawl, and is sympathetic to the vast numbers of Americans who very clearly prefer it. Secondly, his critique is neither aesthetic nor moralistic in tone, but based on social science. Utilizing a landmark 30,000-person survey, he shows that sprawl fosters civic disengagement, diminishes social trust, accentuates inequality, and negatively impacts the environment. Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship will not only be the most comprehensive work in print on the subject, it will be the first to offer a empirically rigorous critique of the most popular form of living in America today.

There is much controversy about the dangers of a free media when it comes to children and adolescents. Many believe that this constitutional right should be amended, altered, or revoked entirely to prevent the young from being negatively influenced. Graphic violence, sexual content, and the depiction of cigarette smoking have all come under fire as being unacceptable in media that is geared toward adolescents, from television and movies to magazines and advertising. Yet not much has been written about the developmental science behind these ideas, and what effects a free media really has on adolescents.
This book presents a synthesis of all current knowledge about the developmental effects of a free media on adolescents. Levesque first presents a full analysis of research studies into the media's effects on adolescents in four key areas: sexuality, violence, smoking, and body image. All findings are assessed within the context of normal adolescent development. Levesque then discusses how this knowledge can be used to inform current standards for the regulation of free speech with regard to adolescents. Both legal restrictions and less formal regulatory bodies (schools, parent groups, etc.) are reviewed to present a full picture of the ways in which a free media is constrained to protect adolescent's development.

Based on fieldwork in Malaysia, this book provides a critical examination of the country's main urban region. The study first provides a theoretical reworking of geographies of modernity and details the emergence of a globally-oriented, 'high-tech' stage of national development. The Multimedia Super Corridor is framed in terms of a political vision of a 'fully developed' Malaysia before the author traces an imagined trajectory through surrounding landscapes in the late 1990s. As the first book length giving an academic analysis of the development of Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan Area and the construction of the Multimedia Super Corridor, this work offers a situated, contextual account which will appeal to all those with research interests in Asian Urban Studies and Asian Sociology.

How is it that, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones?
In his important new book, Five Miles Away, A World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia--one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day. The Supreme Court, in accord with the wishes of the Nixon administration, allowed the suburbs to lock nonresidents out of their school systems. City schools, whose student bodies were becoming increasingly poor and black, simply received more funding, a measure that has proven largely ineffective, while the independence (and superiority) of suburban schools remained sacrosanct. Weaving together court opinions, social science research, and compelling interviews with students, teachers, and principals, Ryan explains why all the major education reforms since the 1970s--including school finance litigation, school choice, and the No Child Left Behind Act--have failed to bridge the gap between urban and suburban schools and have unintentionally entrenched segregation by race and class. As long as that segregation continues, Ryan forcefully argues, so too will educational inequality. Ryan closes by suggesting innovative ways to promote school integration, which would take advantage of unprecedented demographic shifts and an embrace of diversity among young adults.
Exhaustively researched and elegantly written by one of the nation's leading education law scholars, Five Miles Away, A World Apart ties together, like no other book, a half-century's worth of education law and politics into a coherent, if disturbing, whole. It will be of interest to anyone who has ever wondered why our schools are so unequal and whether there is anything to be done about it.