Assault on Kids and Teachers

List of Tables - Joyce E. King: Foreword - Introduction - Roberta Ahlquist: The "Empire" Strikes Back with a Neoliberal Agenda: Confronting the Legacies of Colonialism and Popular Resistance - Monique Redeaux-Smith: "Won't Back Down, Don't Know How": The Fight for Walter H. Dyett High School - Richard D. Lakes/Lisa Healey/Paul McLennan/Susan McWethy/Jennifer Sauer/Mary Anne Smith: Exposing the Myths of Privatization: Popular Education and Political Activism in a Southern U.S. City - Carolyne J. White/Leah Z. Owens: "Getting Up" and Claiming Political Power in Newark: Citizens Taking Action for Radically Democratic Possibilities - Paul C. Gorski: Poverty Ideologies and the Possibility of Equitable Education: How Deficit, Grit, and Structural Views Enable or Inhibit Just Policy and Practice for Economically Marginalized Students - Alan Singer/Eustace Thompson: Battling Zero-Tolerance in Schools and the School-to-Prison Pipeline - Theresa Montaño/Maria Elena Cruz: Educate, Agitate and Organize: One Union's Response to the Teacher Shortage and Union Bashing - Virginia Lea: Re-Routing the Nightmare: Why We Need Another Movement to Create an Equitable Public Education System in Wisconsin and Across the United States - Julie Gorlewski/Peter M. Taubman: From Despair to Hope: reClaiming Education - Julian Vasquez Heilig/T. Jameson Brewer/Terrenda White: What Instead?: Reframing the Debate About Charter Schools, Teach For America, and High-Stakes Testing - Erica K. Dotson/Alison G. Dover/Nick Henning/Ruchi Agarw al-Rangnath: They Should See Themselves as Powerful: Teacher Educators, Agency, and Resisting TPAs - Contributors.

Roberta Ahlquist has been a professor at San Jose State for over 30 years, supervising prospective high school teachers. Her areas of research include critical race theory, unlearning racism, critical multicultural education, indigenous education, and postcolonial studies.

Paul C. Gorski is Associate Professor of Integrative Studies at George Mason University where he coordinates degree programs in social justice and human rights. He is the founder of EdChange and the Equity Literacy Institute. His other books include Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap and Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education.


Theresa Montaño is an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at California State University Northridge. She teaches courses to prospective teachers in the area of equity and diversity in school, Chicano/a childhood and adolescence, and research in Chicano/a education. Her areas of research include the schooling of Chicano/a-Latino/a students; critical pedagogy; teacher activism; and bilingual/ELL instruction.

"So-called 'solutions' for improving public education interconnect in troubling ways-as is revealed insightfully and compellingly in this new and timely book. Ahlquist, Gorski, and Montaño have assembled an impressive collection of analyses that help us to unmask what are mere symptoms of broader movements to widen educational disparities, and to imagine alternatives and interventions with insight and conviction. Assault on Kids and Teachers should cause us to pause, and reimagine, and should be read immediately."-Kevin Kumashiro, Author, The Seduction of Common Sense: How the Right Has Framed the Debate on America's Schools; President-Elect, National Association for Multicultural Education