New Books In Public Policy

Adam Seth Levine has written American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction (Princeton University Press, 2015). Levine teaches in the Department of Government at Cornell University. If we have learned anything about American politics over the last several months, it is that there are a lot of people who are angry about the present and fearful about the future. American Insecurity demonstrates why it is difficult to channel these sentiments into political action. Using a series of lab and field experiments, we learn in American Insecurity that those who feel economically insecure may be de-mobilized if reminded about their insecurity. There are numerous implications of Levine’s findings for how we understand the psychology of insecurity and the ways interest groups might hone mobilization strategies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The experience of the African American middle class has been an important area of research in the USA. However, the British experience has, by comparison, not been subject to the same amount of attention, particularly with regard to the middle class experience of education. Dr. Nicola Rollock, Deputy Director, Centre for Research in Race & Education and Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Education, along with her co-authors, explores this under researched area in The Colour of Class: The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes (Routledge, 2014). Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the idea of intersectionality, and Bourdieu, the book depicts the strategies associated with choosing schools, the narratives of families’ educational experiences, along with the legacy of racism within the British education system. The book is an important intervention into recent debates around educational attainment, charting the changing strategies, and changing perceptions, held by this section

There is no shortage of talk about our public schools being broken. Some critics say we need to embrace a reform agenda that includes more standardized testing and a longer school day for students and performance pay and an end to tenure for teachers. Others respond that the effects of these measures are overstated or counterproductive and that the most sensible place to start is to dramatically increase funding for public schools in their current form. Whatever their positions or priorities, both sides in this debate are likely making the same key assumption — public schools are the best way to promote socio-economic mobility. This means that they still envision a lot of the same things, like an adult teaching a large group of children, who are approximately the same age, content that someone else has decided is important for them to learn. What if they instead accepted that other social programs would be a more effective means of achieving equity in our society? What if they believed that public education w

Jessica Martucci‘s fascinating new book traces the emergence, rise, and continued practice of breastfeeding in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks at the lives and work of scientists, nurses, medical researchers, lay groups, doctors, and mothers to understand the shifting meanings of breastfeeding since the 1930s. Early chapters that explore the construction of a modern ideology of “natural motherhood” in the “psy-ences” and beyond, and look carefully at the medical profession’s interest in breastfeeding in the early-mid twentieth century. The next chapters consider the roles that women played – as mothers and nurses – in the survival of the practice through the midcentury, and consider the rise of lay organizations like La Leche League. The last chapters of the book follow the development and rise of breast pump technology and the “professionalization of breastfeeding expertise,” and

How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale Jamieson (Environmental Studies and Philosophy, NYU) grapples with these questions. The book is a pragmatic philosophical exploration of climate change and the human response to it at the same time that it provides a clear scientific, conceptual, and economic history of the issues involved. Ultimately, the book asks how to “live in productive relationship with the dynamic systems that govern a changing planet” (180). Our conversation covers the obstacles to action on climate change, competing economic approaches to addressing climate change, the needed ethical and moral resources, a reflection on the 2015 Paris talks, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William C. Smith (ed.), senior associate with RESULTS Educational Fund, joins New Books in Education to discuss The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice (Symposium Books, 2016). This edited volume provides an analysis of the global testing culture that has permeated societies throughout the world. With a diverse range of academic contributors, perspectives of this global phenomenon are thoroughly explored and problematized at various levels of societies, from an expansive macro view from the top, down to the micro view of individual actors. You can find more information on the author and on the Right to Education Index (RTEI) at www.results.org. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can connect to the host at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Faricy has written Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Faricy is an assistant professor of political science and public policy at The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Conventional wisdom says that Democrats fight to expand spending on social policy, while Republicans push to lower taxes. In Welfare for the Wealthy, we learn that the situation is a bit more complicated than that. By focusing on tax expenditures as a form of social policy, Faricy spotlights the partisan consensus on providing citizens with health, education, and income benefits. The distinction, he argues, is in the mechanism for providing – and who typically from – these benefits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It seems obvious that children need to be loved, that having a loving home and upbringing is essential to a child’s emotional and cognitive development. It is also obvious that, under typical circumstances at least, for every child there are adults who should love them. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that many national and international charters and declarations specifically ascribe to children a right to be loved. But the idea that children have a right to be loved seems philosophically suspicious. Questions arise almost instantly: Could there be right to be loved? Could children hold such a right? To whom does the correlate duty to love a child fall? What would such a duty require? One might also begin to wonder: What are the implications of such a right for family, parenting, child-rearing, and adoption? In The Right to be Loved (Oxford University Press, 2015), S. Matthew Liao works carefully and systematically through all of these questions in providing a compelling defense of the idea that children

Have you seen those Facebook memes floating around, arguing that we shouldn’t support a 15-dollar -per-hour minimum wage for service sector workers because the military doesn’t earn a living wage? Jennifer Mittelstadt tells us how these stark lines were drawn between the military and the civilian economy – and on how military welfare affects us all. Jennifer Mittelstadt is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 2015). You can read more about her research here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Stoker is the co-author (with Clarence Stone, John Betancur, Susan Clarke, Marilyn Dantico, Martin Horak, Karen Mossberger, Juliet Musso, Jeffrey Sellers, Ellen Shiau, Harold Wolman, and Donn Worgs) of Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Stoker is professor of public policy political science at George Washington University and a member of the faculty of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Administration. After decades of deindustrialization and population loss, the revitalization of cities has paid scant attention to empowering neighborhoods and neighborhood leaders to move ahead. Focusing on neighborhoods in six cities (Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto), recasts the debate about the future of cities as one about neighborhoods, rather than downtown development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whatever its current prestige in our society, teaching is undoubtedly complex work. Like physicians and therapists, teachers work with people, rather than things. They try to help their students to improve over time, and while they have influence, they do not have complete control. Unlike these other human-centered professions, we often see teachers as being directly responsible for the success or failure of their students. It is their job to create equality of opportunity. The onus of our entire nation is placed on individuals, and the pressure is enormous. How do teachers navigate the anxieties associated with this work? How do they deal with the conflicting demands of their numerous stakeholders? How has their work changed in response to new technology and an emphasis on standardized testing? In Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher (Metropolitan Books, 2014), Garret Keizer reflects on his return to teaching English at the same rural Vermont high school he left to pursue a full-time writ

Historic Preservation in a Nutshell (West Academic Publishing, 2014), co-authored by Sara Bronin and Ryan Rowberry provides the first-ever in-depth summary of historic preservation law within its local, state, tribal, federal, and international contexts. Historic Preservation is a burgeoning area of law that includes aspects of property, land use, environmental, constitutional, cultural resources, international, and Native American law. This book covers the primary federal statutes, and many facets of state statutes, dealing with the protection and preservation of historic resources. It also includes key topics like the designation process, federal agency obligations, local regulation, takings and other constitutional concerns, and real estate development issues. Some of the topics we cover are: * How the most enduring historic preservation laws manage to achieve protective aims while balancing a range of other values * The four primary methods of advancing the goals of the preservation movement.

Moral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there indeed is some one thing that she ought to do. And if she were indeed to do this thing, she would thereby morally succeed. But we know from experience that our moral lives involve moral dilemmas. These are cases in which it seems that moral success is not possible because every action available to us is morally wrong, even unacceptable. In such cases, morality requires what is impossible: no matter what one does, one acts as one ought not to act. In Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lisa Tessman proposes an original account of impossible moral demands, and forcefully argues for an approach to moral theory that can recognize their normative authority. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Associate Professor in U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin. His book Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) is a detail and illuminating analysis of the reception of Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Geary argues that the report was neither a conservative or a liberal document but rather a conflicted one whose internal contradictions reflected the breakup of the liberal consensus and its legacy. The ambiguities of the report allowed multiple interpretations, from both the left and the right, and marked the emergence of neoconservatism. Conservatives used the report to rally against the liberal welfare state and promote African Americans self-help. Liberals saw in the document the need to go beyond legal equality to aggressive economic intervention through training programs, job creation and the family wage. The extensive and long debate over the report involved the issues o

How has American cultural and artistic policy changed over the last 25 years? Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programmes Redefined US Artists for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2014) explains the process of policy-making, funding models, NGOs and specific places that have shaped the current cultural settlement in the USA. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s book uses examples of policy reports, theatre and cross-arts organisations, as well as drawing on debates about creative platemaking. The multi-disciplinary approach allows Performing Policy to speak directly to the history of arts funding, in the context of the U.S.’s culture wars, as well as to the contemporary question of the role and purpose of the artist in society, along with how those artists might be educated. The book will be important reading for cultural policy and arts management students, as well as those in cultural studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How are scientific discoveries transmitted to medical clinical practice? When the science is new, controversial, or simply unclear, how should a doctor advise his or her patients? How should information from large randomized controlled trials be weighed against the clinician’s hard-won judgment from treating hundreds of patients? These are some of the questions that are considered by Miriam Solomon in Making Medical Knowledge (Oxford University Press 2015). Solomon, who is professor of philosophy at Temple University, provides an historically grounded critical assessment of the methods used in recent decades to turn basic science results into medical knowledge: consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We may disagree about whether phonics or whole language is the better approach to reading instruction or whether bilingual education or English immersion is the better way to support English language learners. Whatever our opinions are, they are founded on the perceived immediate impact on students in school. But how might the way we use language with children years before they enter school affect their academic potential? Does it have the ability to improve more than their vocabulary? Can it foster creativity, empathy, and perserverence? In Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain (Dutton, 2015), Dr. Dana Suskind outlines research on the critical language period and connects it to an early-childhood curriculum and a series of public policy solutions. Suskind joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work with the Thirty Million Words Initiative on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with heron Twitter at @DrDanaSuskind. Yo

Many of us went through school not fully knowing what we were supposed to be learning or how our teachers were measuring our progress. These priorities and processes were largely hidden to us as students because they were assumed to be irrelevant or uninteresting. How much learning can happen under these conditions? What if teachers translated standards into student-friendly language and worked with students to develop personalized goals? What if teachers asked students to examine their work and articulate their growth to their parents and classmates? How might increasing ownership and changing accountability allow for greater learning? In Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools Through Student-Engaged Assessment(Jossey-Bass, 2014), Ron Berger and co-authors, Leah Rugen and Libby Woodfin, outline a series of practices designed to make students more active participants in their school experience, including student-led conferences, celebrations of learning, and passage presentations. Berger joins

What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all manner of information and context to material created by others? Joseph M. Reagle, assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, examines these online pontificators and provocateurs in his new book Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web (MIT Press, 2015). Reagle categorizes the different kinds of comments, thereby organizing the different kinds of commenters into groups. In addition, Reagle considers both the function and value of comments in society. Just listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There has been a lot of talk in the United States recently about same-sex marriage. One obvious question is sociological: What are the implications of marriage equality for the longstanding social institution of marriage? But there are philosophical questions as well. What is the purpose of marriage? What are the goods that marriage helps individuals realize? Once marriage is no longer understood to be restricted to heterosexual couples, must we then question whether it should be restricted to couples? Why not recognize plural marital arrangements? Why should there be a civil institution of marriage at all? In Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage (Princeton University Press, 2015), Stephen Macedo explores a range of philosophical, moral, and legal issues pertaining to marriage. He argues that, as a matter of justice, marriage rights must be extended to same-sex couples. But he also argues that marriage as an institution should be restricted to monogamous couples. Along the way