Kirjahaku

Explores the ideological underpinnings of school choice and other market-based education reforms.Advocates of market-based education reforms (including such policies as choice, charters, vouchers, and outright privatization) argue that they represent ready solutions to clearly defined problems. Critics of market models, on the other hand, argue that these reforms misperceive the purposes of public education and threaten its democratic ethos. This book explores both the promises and pitfalls of market forces-their potential to improve the quality of public education and their compatibility with its republican justifications. Smith argues that although market models of education are not without utilitarian merit, their potential to alter the social-democratic purposes of education is seriously underestimated. He supports this claim with a series of sophisticated analyses of the key assumptions underlying these models, and by examining the normative elements of theory and methodology that can-and often do-skew empirical policy analysis toward market preferences. He concludes that market reforms are not just a ready means to effectively address the problems of public schooling but rather represent a clear attempt to ideologically redefine its ends.

Tackles the debate of what is driving mass incarceration in America and assesses the political, social, and economic impact across the 50 states.The U.S. incarcerates four times more people per capita than Australia, five times more than the United Kingdom, six times more than Canada, and eight times more than Germany. The United States contains more ex-prisoners than the entire population of Ireland, and more people with a felony record than the populations of Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and Liberia combined. Why did the United States become the world’s biggest jailer? And, just as importantly, what has it done to us? How has having the world’s biggest population of ex-prisoners shaped us socially, economically, and politically? In this landmark book, Kevin B. Smith explains that the United States became the world’s biggest jailer because politicians wanted to do something about a very real problem with violent crime. That effort was accelerated by a variety of partisan and socio-demographic trends that started to significantly reshape state political environments in the 1980s and 1990s. The force of those trends varied from state to state, but ultimately led to not just historically unprecedented levels of incarceration, but equally unprecedented numbers of ex-prisoners. Serving time behind bars is now a normalized social experience—it affects a majority of Americans directly or indirectly. There is a clear price, a jailer’s reckoning, to be paid for this. As this book shows, it is a society with declining levels of civic cohesion, reduced economic prospects, and less political engagement. Mass incarceration turns out to be something of a hidden bomb, a social explosion that inflicts enormous civic collateral damage.