Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

In a time when safety, bullying, and cyberbullying are on the rise and in the daily news, this book is a gift to school educators and educators/counselors in training. The authors have written a book of case studies adapted from the sad realities that occur in our schools. Each case is a powerful example of what can and does occur in schools, intended for school employees and students. The book is extremely user friendly. The authors' preface gives instructions about how to use the book and includes information about terminology used in the cases. There are 11 rich and complex cases for the reader/user to explore. Each chapter gives a detailed description of the case. The authors then provide well-researched information about the case, including federal law references. They also offer a series of thoughtful questions to analyze and discuss the case. The concluding chapter has mini-cases to help administrators analyze additional safety and bullying issues in schools. This is a great tool for educators and administrators as they work to create safe learning environments for students.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through professionals.

The overarching intent of this book is to provide a succinct but thorough summary of evidence-based research, practice, and intervention strategies regarding critical issues faced by school-based mental health practitioners within a socioecological framework. The book contains fifteen topical chapters addressing current school-based mental health concerns, giving special attention to developmental considerations, gender, and ethnicity. The book provides six articles that focus on the primary disorders found in school-age students, including externalizing and internalizing behaviors, learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, substance use, and eating disorders. Five chapters address critical issues that have received less attention in school mental health literature, including health issues, sexuality, LBGTQ youth, bullying, and sexual violence. Additional chapters focus on family and community domains and include adjustment issues, family adjustment issues, and the effects of childhood and family trauma. The final chapter presents a universal prevention model and a socioecological model for schools to use in addressing mental health concerns. Each chapter discusses evidence-based treatment and its strengths and limitations, as well as ways that school personnel might respond and assist. The discussions are research-based and address the complexities of the disorders without becoming too dense for advanced undergraduate readers.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and practitioners.

Many initiatives promote the values and virtues of increasing access to education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Providing entree to STEM education, it is argued, improves educational and occupational opportunities later in life, which is especially true for diverse learners, including children of color, English learners, and students from low-SES backgrounds. In Engaging Primary Children in Mathematics, Sangster examines how young children think and learn about mathematics while providing ways to help teachers teach effectively. The book's 20 chapters are organized into four helpful sections covering how children learn, ways to develop primary mathematics curriculum, issues affecting learning, and teachers' influence on children's learning. The book is appropriate for both the beginning and the master teacher, and Sangster provides helpful suggestions to create a learning environment in which young children can work as mathematicians, with an emphasis on exploring, creating, and solving problems. Well written and organized, the work provides a variety of instructional strategies and activities grounded in various research-based and theoretical approaches to teaching mathematics. A great complement for Marilyn Burns's About Teaching Mathematics: A K-8 Resource (4th edition).Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through practitioners.

Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence, by Megan E. Tompkins-Strange (Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan), addresses a critically important subject, one that has only recently begun to seize the attention of scholars--the role of philanthropic organizations in education policy. For many decades, the inner workings of foundations and their motivations and goals were largely unexplored by either the media or education scholars (a group which, incidentally, overlapped with large grant recipients). But in the last several years, the impact of foundations on education policy has become impossible to ignore, and this book adds to the emerging debate. Tompkins-Strange focuses on four of the most significant foundations in this area: the Ford Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. She conducted 60 in-depth interviews with high level foundation officials over the course of several years, and uncovered a range of attitudes toward important questions on the foundations' influence as well as their proper role in a democratic society. Policy Patrons is an important work in this emerging field of study.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students and researchers and faculty.

The Great Mistake is a lucid, thorough analysis of the decline of American public universities over the last two generations. By many measures, Newfield shows, the public university is in crisis, a crisis of concept as much as a crisis of management and finance. Drawing on political and economic analysis, as well as his long experience in faculty leadership, Newfield identifies an eight-step cycle of devolution rooted, fundamentally, in America's deliberate abandonment of the public purposes (and demonstrable public benefits) of state universities. Throughout the analysis, he challenges popular myths about higher education finance: that chasing research grants is highly profitable, that public universities are wasteful and inefficient, that tuition hikes result directly from state cuts, and (most important) that the benefits of public higher education are primarily private. The book's prose is lively and accessible, incorporating parents' and students' perspectives as well as research by prominent scholars. Though the conclusion's blueprint for change is not as straightforward as readers might hope, the book's call to arms is convincing. This is an important, timely book.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Over the past several decades, the attention given to school safety has escalated, particularly considering widely publicized school violence. The author offers a thoughtful discussion of the various actions school officials and politicians have implemented in the name of school safety. Though numerous tragic events have accelerated many of these actions, the author methodically analyzes the unforeseen, detrimental effects of overreactions and how these have impacted the lives of students, particularly those from diverse or impoverished backgrounds. Although the media spotlight has focused on the tragic events of large-scale school shootings, the author thoughtfully examines all acts that inhibit a safe school climate for all students. The nature of the discussion is both meaningful and engaging. However, the most compelling components of the text are the author's analyses of various data. For example, though the analysis of disciplinary practices and its negative effects on students from African American or Latino backgrounds is anticipated, the review of data on the likelihood of their future civic and political participation as adults is impressive. This type of complicated insight on all issues of school safety elevates this text into a necessary read.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through practitioners.