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The first major battle over school choice was part of the struggle to equalize and integrate schools in the civil rights era, when it became apparent that choice could be either a serious barrier or a significant tool for reaching these goals. The second movement for choice has been very different. This large—and continuing—movement is part of an anti—government, individualistic, market—based movement in a more conservative period. This period that has forgotten many of the lessons of that earlier time, although it has once again seen choice presented as the answer to racial inequality. This book brings civil rights back to the center of the debate and moves from doctrine to empirical research in exploring the many forms of choice and their widely differing consequences for equity in US schools. The contributors conclude that although helping minority children remains a central justification for choice proponents, compelling new research shows that ignoring the essential civil rights dimensions of systems for choice usually means compounding rather than remedying racial inequality.

Since the 1990s, K-12 schools across the U.S. have changed in important ways in an effort to maintain safe schools. They have added police officers, surveillance cameras, zero tolerance policies, and other equipment and personnel, while increasingly relying on suspension and other punishments. Unfortunately, we have implemented these practices based on assumptions that they will be effective at maintaining safety and helping youth, not based on evidence. The Real School Safety Problem addresses this problem in two ways. One, it provides a clear discussion of what we know and what we don’t yet know about the school security and punishment practices and their effects on students and schools. Two, it offers original research that extends what we know in important ways, showing how school security and punishment affects students, their families, their schools and their communities years into the future. Schools are indeed in crisis. But the real school safety problem is not that students are either out of control or in danger. Rather, the real school safety problem is that our efforts to maintain school safety have gone too far and in the wrong directions. As a result, we over-police and punish students in a way that hurts students, their families and their communities in broad and long-lasting ways.

Since the 1990s, there has been a resurgence of interest in single-sex education across the United States, and many public schools have created all-boys and all-girls classes for students in grades K through 12. This book provides an in-depth analysis of controversies sparked by recent efforts to separate boys and girls at school. Reviewing evidence from research studies, court cases, and hundreds of news media reports on local single-sex initiatives, the author offers fresh insight into popular conceptions of the nature and significance of gender differences in education and beyond.