Teaching to change the world (review)

Teaching to change the world was written for teachers to address why they should and how they can pursue the teaching of social justice in schools. The book is based on the authors' past teaching experiences, and the authors discuss key issues that all educators must face from the historical to current perspective in the teaching of social justice. Each chapter addressed the struggles that classroom teachers have as they adjust to the changes in the field of education. New findings including successes, failures, and their determination to create a culture of curious, achieving students were discussed. The examples they provide throughout the book's twelve chapters show how they deal with the greater emphasis on teacher accountability and the endless debate about how to best to help all students learn.

Chapter 1 describes the U.S. student population including race, culture, economic status, disabilities and whether or not they are native English speakers. This chapter is concerned with the inequalities in the American public schools today, as well as what life experiences are outside of school, and the types of inequalities students experience in the school system. Racial groups are not distributed evenly across the country. Racial disparities in children's access to basic life necessities are compounded by the segregation of low-income children, unequal opportunities to learn, and disadvantages from poor communities that provide unsafe school environments. These are about twice as likely to report the presence of street gangs at school than is the case for students in middle-class communities. The differences in opportunities are followed by differences in school outcomes, academic achievement, high school graduation rates, and college attendance due to the impact of persistent inequalities. The authors end the first chapter by introducing four teachers who incorporate social justice into their instructional practices and strive to improve their classrooms by recognizing the diversity of their students and acknowledging the struggles they face. According to the four teachers portrayed, they believed hard work and endurance in schools and teaching can truly change a world where lives are marked by poverty, discrimination, and injustice, by hard work and endurance.

Chapter 2 includes a review of the historical context that led to policies requiring schools to serve students with special needs, and discussed how deficit ideologies have constrained schools' responses to diversity. In addition, today's schools did not grow out of a rational plan with decisions made to create a learning environment in a logical and efficient manner. School culture is derived by the events going on in the world around us and changes are hard fought and held back by the customs and by societies' expectations and beliefs. The chapter provided a brief outline of seminal events in the history of American public schools, with a sketch as to how the expectations for school have increased over the past 200 years. Two powerful and pervasive ideas that have shaped American schooling, as well as equality of opportunities of education toward all ethnicity were discussed, meritocracy and white superiority. Schools do not operate in a vacuum and reflect the ideas of the society that produces them in general and the needs of the powerful in society, specifically. Change is natural but it does not happen easily or without resistance from those who have a stake in the old system remaining the same. Education did not live up to our lofty ideals of a democratic society; schools have always been primarily controlled by rich and powerful men. It is those men in positions of power who have made the decisions historically in education.

In the early education system, only a few were educated to fill the professional positions, with the rest of the population taught basic academic skills to socialize them and prepare them to work for others. As society changed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the industrialization of America created different needs and demands for the educational system. Social reformers and politicians wanted schools to provide daycare...