New Books in Public Policy

Donald Kettl is the author of Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Competence (Brookings Press, 2016). Kettl is professor of public policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. With trust in government at all-time lows, what is there to do? Kettl’s book places our current moment into a longer history of bi-partisan commitment to effective government. In Escaping Jurassic Government, he argues that we have lost our commitment to competency, and thus have pulled from the Right and the Left for more or less government, rather than better government. Kettl suggests that there are at least four ways forward; the most optimistic direction focused on a renewed commitment to people and effective government management. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In the early 2000s, the press–at least in Boston, where I was living at the time–was full of shrill stories about drug-crazed addicts breaking into area pharmacies in search of something called “Oxycontin.” I had no idea what Oxycontin was, but I was pretty sure there must be something remarkable about it if ordinary drug fiends were risking jail time and worse by robbing mom-and-pop drug stores to get it. As Sam Quinones explains in his remarkable book Dreamland: The True Tale of American’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury Press, 2015), the Oxycontin crime wave was an early moment in the emergence of a full-blown Opiate epidemic in the United States. For many young doctors working in “pain management in the 90s and naughts, Oxycontin was remarkable indeed. It gave them just what their predecessors in the eternal fight against pain lacked: a supposedly non-addictive opium-based medication that they could prescribe far and wide without fear of hooking their patients on it. And with all the best intentions, prescribe it far and wide these doctors did. But it wasn’t non-addictive at all; masses of patients become dependent. And not only them. Drug-users learned that “Oxy” afforded a wonderful high, and it became highly coveted “on the street.” The rub was that this new “wonder drug” was either hard to get–unless you had access to a “Pill Mill”–and/or very expensive. So Oxycontin addicts got desperate. Some, like the ones the press was screaming about in Boston, stole the drug from the local CVS and the like. Most, however, turned to an old drug that was easier to get and cheaper: Black Tar Heroin from Mexico. In the wake of Oxycontin, Black Tar spread from the Southwest across much of the U.S., even to places like Western Massachusetts, where I live now and the heroin epidemic is in full, tragic swing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Prerna Singh has written How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Singh is the Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University and faculty fellow at the Watson Institute. How do sub-units of government meet the everyday needs of their residents? Do they vary in how well they provide basic health and education services? Singhs book makes a novel argument about these questions with extensive original data collection. How Solidarity Works suggests that sub-national units, states and provinces, can develop solidarity between residents. When this solidarity is high it is associated with developing strong regimes of social welfare programs. Conversely, when sub-national solidarity is low, there is little basis around which to provide for those in greatest need. This intricately argued book marshals an enormous amount of original information about several states in India. The empirical findings and larger theoretical argument are remarkable and worthy of replication outside of India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

It can be tempting to generalize certain attributes of schools as either being good or bad. Magnet and charter schools are often characterized as being inherently good. They usually offer special programs that ground all of their instruction. Having that choice is appealing to many families, and why not? Someone must have put a lot of thought into creating that special program, convincing stakeholders to open a school, and persuading teachers to build their curriculum around the program often times forgoing a higher salary at another school. With the neighborhood school, it seems like had to be there, and there is not anything special” about it that ties it together, except maybe geography. How is it supposed to compete with International Baccalaureate or STEM or performing arts? These things seem to give school a purpose. But what if the special program is something unexpected, perhaps something with a bit more baggage? How do geography, industry, and what our society expects from students influence the special programs made available to them? Are there any school lotteries you would think twice about before entering your child? In A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in US Public Schools (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Nicole Nguyen, provides an ethnography of a public high school that responded to calls for reform by adopting homeland security as its primary focus and lens for all other classes. She explores the history of militarization in schools, its impact on students, and the intersection of ethics and personal politics. Nguyen joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with her via email at [email protected]. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Whatever your role — teacher, principal, or superintendent — when you work in a school system, you experience tensions between your reasons for going into education and how you actually spend your time in schools. You might be driven to support student-directed learning, coach new teachers, or initiate portfolio assessment, but you continually find yourself called away from those drivers. Instead, you have to assume some other responsibility that you may not see as essential but has gradually taken up more your time sometimes without explanation. How do we change institutions, like schools, to ensure that we are focused on our actual priorities? How do we jumpstart uncomfortable conversations? What can we learn from schools that were willing to totally rethink how they do things? In #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education (Jossey-Bass, 2014), Grant Lichtman shares reflections following his three-month road trip across the country to visit schools and discuss innovation with stakeholders inside and outside the classroom. Lichtman joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work on his blog. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @GrantLichtman. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Most of the time, school performance is not like performance in other arenas. In music, we want people to play something for us. In sports, we want people to show us our skills. Performance in school is filtered through test scores and letter grades. When we ask students how they are doing in reading, we do not expect them to actually read to us or share their thoughts on a recent books they have finished. We expect to learn them to tell us a reading level or point to wherever they are on a rubric. But what does that mean? Have we lost sight of the actual value of the things we are attempting to measure and quantify? What if we looked at school work the way we attend practices, games, and recitals? In Digital Student Portfolios: A Whole School Approach to Connected Learning and Continuous Assessment (Theory and Practice, 2014), Matt Renwick, outlines the rationale for portfolio work in the twenty first century, including how portfolios can motivate and empower students, provide evidence for report cards and school conferences, guide the instruction of teachers, and share school language with families. Renwick joins New Books in Education for the Interview. You can find more information about his work on his blog. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @ReadByExample. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Battles over school politics from curriculum to funding to voucher systems are key and contentious features of the political landscape today. Many of these familiar fights started in the 1970s. However, these battles have roots even earlier in mid-twentieth century school reform debates according to Campbell F. Scribner of the University of Maryland-College Park, who has a new book on the topic, The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy (Cornell University Press, 2016). The Fight for Local Control discusses rural struggles for local control of school districts in this earlier period, mostly in the North, and their connection to the later suburban/urban battles. Rural resistance to the closing of one-room schools and the consolidation of small school districts provided a language and model that was then used by suburban communities to fight urban, state, and federal regulation of their schools, including the famously contentious fights over integration in the form of busing. The book also examines how conservatives later abandoned local control arguments in favor of individual choice policies. In this episode of the podcast, Scribner discusses how he got into the topic and the main insights of the book. He tells us about the regional differences in school systems and education politics. He explains some of the virtues and pitfalls of local control arguments and how his book might inform our thinking about current education politics. Finally, he also talks about doing research on rural schools with sparse, decentralized records. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In her new book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford Law Books, 2016), Samantha Barbas provides a history of Americans’ use of law to manage their public image. She approaches this endeavor from the perspective of a legal and cultural historian, tracking the correlation between a growing American image consciousness and the rise of laws, such as the tort of invasion of privacy and damages for emotional distress, which enabled individuals to control and defend their public persona. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The school structures we present to teachers can sometimes resemble two extremes. In the first set of circumstances, teachers have enormous autonomy over what they teach, when they teach it, and how they teach it. In the second, they have almost no choices whatsoever. The texts are all provided, along with the objectives, the script, and the pacing guide. I am not sure that either of these working conditions are sustainable longterm. Obviously, no one enjoys being told exactly what to do. It conveys a lack of trust and respect. But it is an awesome responsibility to be told that everything is up to you. When we live in a culture that continually reinforces the idea that the longterm success of every student is tied to a single teacher’s priorities, words, and actions, this is a recipe for burnout. Are there practices that provide room for creativity without placing an unreasonable burden on individual teachers? How might teachers’ aims inform their choices? How can all teachers facilitate deeper learning in a sustainable way? In Learning That Lasts: Challenging, Engaging, and Empowering Students with Deeper Instruction (Jossey-Bass, 2016) Ron Berger and co-authors, Libby Woodfin and Anne Vilen, outline instructional moves, lesson structures, and discussion protocols that ask more from students and work in a variety of teaching contexts. Woodfin joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work with Expeditionary Learning on its website. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

As evidenced by many of the conversations featured on this podcast, scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands composes a significant and influential genre within the field of U.S. Western History and Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies. Geographically rooted in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, or Greater Mexico, publications in this subfield explore a broad range of themes including: migration and labor, citizenship and race, culture and identity formation, gender and sexuality, politics and social justice, just to name a few. This episode features a conversation with two historians of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Kelly Lytle Hernandez, author of Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (UC Press, 2010), and John Mckiernan Gonzalez, author of Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942 (Duke University Press, 2012). My discussion with Kelly and John focuses on their exemplary scholarship to explore how historians conceptualize, investigate, and explain the history of the U.S.-Mexico Border region. In particular, we discuss how the U.S.-Mexico border exists in the minds of policy makers, bureaucrats, low level officials, businessmen and the public at large, as more than a fixed political boundary. Indeed, competing notions of who and what the border is supposed to control has historically shaped ideas about race, public policy, and law enforcement practices throughout the U.S.-Mexico border region. In addition to their existing work, we discuss their forthcoming publications which signal exciting new directions in the field of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies and U.S. History in general. This conversation was recorded during a session of the 109th annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association held earlier this month in Kona, Hawaii. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latino Identity & Politics. DJs dissertation examines the influence of Mexican American civic engagement and political activism on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA from 1930 to 1965. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Jason Stahl is the author of Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Stahl is an historian and lecturer in the Department of Organizational Leadership and Policy Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. What is missing from the explanation of Donald Trump’s rise and the politics of this year’s presidential campaign? Jason Stahl suggests that part of what is missing is a better appreciation of the politics of conservative of ideas over the last seventy years. In his book, he traces the evolution of conservative think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, from small upstarts with little power to major players in national policy making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This week we feature two new books on the podcast, both about corporate power. First, Zachary Roth has written The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (Crown, 2016). Roth is a national reporter for MSNBC. Next, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is the author of Corporate Citizen? An Argument for the Separation of Corporation and State (Carolina Academic Press, 2016). She is an associate professor of law at Stetson University College of Law and a Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. The two books look at the state of the democracy, Roth from the perspective of a reporter covering voting rights issues in state and local government, and Torres-Spelliscy from the perspective of the constitution. Together, these two books address whether corporate power has grown too strong and whether reforms can shift the balance of power in U.S. politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

According to the blurb, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics (Oxford University Press, 2016) “explores the ways in which linguistic diversity mediates social justice in liberal democracies.” This is true, but tends to understate the force of the arguments being put forward here. Ingrid Piller presents a powerful case for how language is variously overlooked or misunderstood as a factor that entrenches disadvantage and inequality in a globalized society. She argues that discrimination based on language persists, often justified by appeal to the false premise that individuals exercise complete control over their own linguistic repertoires, and reinforced by tacit assumptions embedded in our cultural practices. In this interview, we talk about some of the relevant domains, and ask how a better-informed approach to linguistic diversity can potentially help in addressing persistent forms of social injustice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Eric Schickler is the author of Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965 (Princeton University Press, 2016). Schickler is the Jeffrey and Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Much scholarship on the racial realignment of U.S. political parties argues for an elite based explanation focused on Washington and national figures. Schickler’s new book challenges this notion with a deep-dive into the archives. He argues that rather than a top-down explanation, party realignment happened from the bottom-up. He credits the long history of the Civil Rights movement, emergence of new players in organized labor, and state and local forces. Realignment, then, is a gradual process that occurred over decades, rather than primarily in the 1960s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

John Mollenkopf and Manuel Pastor are the editors of Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration (Cornell University Press, 2016). Mollenkopf is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology and Director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Pastor is Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity, Director, USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, and Director, USC Center for the Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California. Much research on immigrant integration has focused on urban settings. In Unsettled Americans, Mollenkopf and Pastor offer a novel collection of comparative studies of immigrant incorporation at the metropolitan level. The book focuses on the reception of immigrants in seven different metro areas, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as Charlotte, Phoenix, San Jose, and California’s “Inland Empire.” The chapter authors also link their findings to new research on regional governance and on spatial variations within metropolitan areas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Robert Boatright, associate professor of political science at Clark University, is the editor of The Deregulatory Moment? A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Campaign finance reform has been a salient topic during this year’s presidential campaign. Everyone from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton has offered opinions on how the money in political campaigns might be better regulated. This attention can be tracked to the most recent unraveling of existing federal regulations by the Supreme Court in a series of decisions, most famously Citizens United. But how does this U.S. story fit into a larger comparative policy environment? Boatright has edited a collection of perspectives drawn from a variety of national contexts, including Canada, Germany, and Australia. The volume shows the extent to which outside of the U.S., we are living through a deregulatory moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

William Resh is the author of Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Resh is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. With a presidential transition looming, attention will soon be drawn to the enormous task of appointing officials to hundreds of federal positions. How those newcomers will interact with long-standing careerists in government is the subject of Resh’s book. Using innovative data collection, he answers a variety of questions that public administration scholars have long pondered. Does trust matter in government? How do appointees and careerists interact? Does this matter for agency performance? Resh offers empirical answers to these seminal questions in the field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Lance deHaven-Smith‘s Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas Press, 2014) investigates how the Founders’ hard-nosed realism about the likelihood of elite political misconduct articulated in the Declaration of Independence has been replaced by today’s blanket condemnation of conspiracy beliefs as ludicrous by definition. Lance deHaven-Smith reveals that the term “conspiracy theory” entered the American lexicon of political speech to deflect criticism of the Warren Commission and traces it back to a CIA propaganda campaign to discredit doubters of the commissions report. For this NBN interview, Lance and Jasun discuss the book and the wider implications of what Lance calls State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD), cultural engineering, and how, when the ruling elite move, they create their own reality. Lance deHaven-Smith is Professor in the Reubin O’D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. A former President of the Florida Political Science Association, deHaven-Smith is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Battle for Florida, which analyzes the disputed 2000 presidential election. Jasun Horsley is the author of Seen & Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist and several other books on “extra-consensual perceptions.” He has a weekly podcast called The Liminalist: The Podcast Between and a blog. For more info, go to http://auticulture.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Communities of parents who refuse, delay, or selectively decline to vaccinate their children pose familiar moral and political questions concerning public health, safety, risk, and immunity. But additionally there are epistemological questions about these communities. Though frequently dismissed as simply ignorant, misinformed, or superstitious, it turns out that vaccine suspicion, denial, and refusal are positively correlated with higher levels of education, and greater depth of knowledge about vaccine science. Accordingly, the common view that vaccine refusal is the product of ignorance seems simplistic. Yet the more strident forms of vaccine refusal are based in demonstrably false beliefs. How is this best explained? In Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care (Routledge 2016) Mark Navin offers a balanced examination of the epistemology and value commitments of various stripes of vaccine refusal. After arguing that vaccine refusers may be reasonable, he defends a novel version of the view that there is a moral requirement to vaccinate one’s children. He then defends the claim that the State may use coercive means to enhance vaccination, but Navin makes room for exemptions for non-medical reasons. Navin’s book is a fascinating philosophical exploration of some very deep questions at the intersection of social epistemology and social ethics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The application of behavioral science inside government has gained steam over the past few years with the creation of so-called “Nudge units” popping up in countries around the world. Their goals are simple: Use the lessons of behavioral science to make government work better. The Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom and the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences team in the U.S. Canada has a team now. Australia. Singapore. All the Scandinavian countries. Behavioral science teams now have a bit of buzz. Before this buzz, there was BIAS – the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project, the first major opportunity to apply a behavioral science lens to programs that serve poor and vulnerable families in the United States. The project, which began in 2010 funded through the Administration of Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, sought to apply behavioral insights to issues related to the design and implementation of social service programs and policies with a goal of learn how such tools could be used to improve the well-being of low-income children, adults, and families. The non-profit education and social policy organization MDRC led the project. (Disclosure: I worked on BIAS in 2010-2011 at one of the partner organizations, ideas42, also participating.) Traditionally, many social programs were designed in ways that individuals must make active decisions and go through a series of steps in order to benefit from them. They must decide which programs to apply to or participate in, complete forms, attend meetings, show proof of eligibility, and arrange travel and child care. Program designers have often assumed that individuals will carefully consider options, analyze details, and make decisions that maximize their well-being. BIAS drew heavily from that past three decades of research in the behavioral sciences showing that human decision making is often imperfect and imprecise. People clients and program administrators alike procrastinate, get overwhelmed by choices, miss details, lose their self-control, rely on mental shortcuts, and permit small changes in the environment to influence their decisions. As a result, programs and participants may not always achieve the goals they set for themselves. Working through ACF programs, the BIAS team designed and tested 15 behaviorally-informed interventions in seven states involving nearly 100,000 people. Many of the interventions involved a redesign of communications materials. Projects ranged from increasing child support collections, to improving child care recertification processes, to changing messaging around TANF participation. Along the way, BIAS researchers published a series of reports laying out not just which designs worked and didn’t, but how they went about implementing the designs in difficult bureaucratic and technological environments and when they faced challenges that altered their work. A final report is due out later this year. Of the 15 interventions, 11 showed positive signs of impact, making the overall project today one proof point among a growing number about the promise of applying insights from behavioral science to make government work better. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

For all that has been written about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, many misconceptions about the man and his achievements continue to persist. Roger Daniels seeks to correct these in a new two-volume biography of the 32nd president, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 (University of Illinois Press, 2015), and Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939-1945 (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Drawing upon Roosevelt’s speeches, press conferences, and other statements, Daniels argues that Roosevelt was not the second-class intellect deemed by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. but a person of considerable intellectual ability who possessed a mastery of not just politics but administration as well. When it came to formulating both domestic and foreign policy Daniels credits Roosevelt as being oriented towards the future in ways unlike many of his contemporaries. This emphasis plays a role in shaping national policy not just on the prominent issues such as the role of the government in the economy but on questions of race and immigration as well, both of which undergo slow but significant shifts during his presidency. The looming threat of war in Europe widened Roosevelt’s scope, and Americas entry into the struggle in 1941 brought with it the opportunity to establish the mechanisms to avoid such global conflicts from happening again. It is thanks to Roosevelt’s focus and his determination to realize his vision, Daniels concludes, that establishes the saliency of his presidency for us today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Daniel E. Dawes has written 150 Years of ObamaCare (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Dawes is the executive director of health policy and external affairs at Morehouse School of Medicine and a lecturer within Morehouse’s Satcher Health Leadership Institute and Department of Community Health and Preventive Medicine. In 150 Years of ObamaCare, Dawes tells the long and often forgotten history of the nearly two century fight for health care equity that culminated in the passage of the Affordable Care Act or ObamaCare. He draws on his role as a leader in a large coalition of organizations that helped shape ObamaCare, revealing what went on behind the scenes. He illustrates this with copies of letters and e-mails written by those who worked to craft and pass the law. Ultimately, Dawes argues that ObamaCare is much more comprehensive in the historical context of previous reform efforts that go back to the Civil War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In this interview, Dr. Katie Gentile discusses the research, writing and creative thinking about compulsory parenthood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (or ARTs) that animate the essays appearing in The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2015). It is striking that while personhood amendments proliferate and sovereignty over the reproductive body shifts frighteningly more and more to the State, a global, bio-medical industrial complex has arisen comprising ARTs, surrogate pregnancy, egg/sperm donation and the like. Gentile points out the rise of the post-9/11 fetishization of the fetus a receptacle for all our vulnerabilities which must be protected at all costs in the face of the hyper-object: the threat of global catastrophe looming large. ARTs and its associated industries manufacture hope and optimism in conceiving babies at any cost (for those of privilege) while serving to further elevate, protect and fetishize the fetus. It’s a space of repro-futurity in which life is constructed around achieving reproductive milestones. ARTs have become another neoliberal trope to imagine life without limits as they have been subsumed into ordinary medicine for all women. With ARTs there is often no space to acknowledge loss, shame, uncertainty and the sexual re-traumatization that often occur during the process. On the plus side, ARTs offer the promise and opportunity of biological parenthood to marginalized people (for example, trans men) resulting in diverse family configurations. Gentile asks can other spaces be nurtured so that babies are not the main focus of generativity, especially for women? How can we better theorize childfree lives of creativity that are not seen as displaced parenting but generativity for its own pleasure? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Many of us are familiar with the court-mandated bussing programs created in an effort to achieve school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s. Far fewer of us realize there were also voluntary transfer programs that were crafted in out-of-court settlements in the decades that followed. For example, as part of the Canford Program, wealthy districts like those in Arbor Town accept between 6-60 students from nearby South Bay City, where resources are more scarce. These children who win the lottery have access to all of the same teachers, facilities, and curricular materials as the students living in the surrounding neighborhoods. Still, their experiences are far from the same. Canford students ride the bus each morning. Their trips are long and chaotic, and as a result, they often arrive late, hungry, or unsettled. These students must quickly transition into routines that fail to take this reality into account, and issues of equity quickly arise. Do the benefits of such a program exceed its costs? How might such a program be redesigned? To what extent is the bus (or recess) part of school anyway? In The Bus Kids: Children’s Experiences with Voluntary Desegregation (Yale University Press, 2009), Ira Lit, recounts the experiences of small children participating in an inter-district transfer program designed to allow students living in a low-income community to attend better-resourced schools in other nearby towns. Lit joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work with the Stanford Teacher Education Program on its website.To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him via email at [email protected]. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Nicole Rudolph‘s At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (Berghahn Books, 2015) contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the three decades after 1945 known as the Trente glorieuses. Rudolph’s emphasis is on French designs and experiences of dwelling, and the interior spaces of French homes in particular. The book argues that housing was essential to the modernizing project that French society engaged in during these years, a vital site of reconstruction in the wake of the Second World War, and a key locus of nation-building and democratization. In this period, the French state actively pursued policies that sought to guarantee its citizens the right to safe, hygienic, and comfortable homes that would nurture individual happiness while helping to strengthen families as the building blocks of a thriving society. From the creation of a Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism in 1945, to the housing crisis of 1953, to the yearly Salon des arts menagers promoting new household methods and technologies, to the oil crisis of the early 1970s, At Home in Postwar France examines the class, gender, and design ideals and tensions of a France in the throes of major transformations on multiple fronts. Pursuing the diffusion, mediation, and reception of the new housing forms that developed in the period, the book considers the contributions of state officials, architects and designers, and proponents of domestic economy and organization in France. It also examines the reactions of the residents and social commentators who felt and evaluated the impact of these forms. At Home in Postwar France explores a range of hopes and dreams for modern French living spaces, thinking through a variety of new approaches to housing on a mass scale. Taking on the complicated relationship between home and citizenship in postwar France, the book offers readers new perspective on how French women and men dwelt and thought about dwelling during this critical period in the nations history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The landscape described in Bernard Harcourt‘s new book is a dystopia saturated by pleasure. We do not live in a drab Orwellian world, he writes. We live in a beautiful, colorful, stimulating, digital world a rich, bright world full of passion and jouissance–and by means of which we reveal ourselves and make ourselves virtually transparent to surveillance. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2015) guides us through our new digital age, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual. Other actors from advertisers to government agencies can compile huge amounts of information about who we are and what we do. Whether they use it to recommend other products to buy or track our movements, Harcourt argues that the influence and interests of other actors is often hidden from us. Despite leaks of classified materials about the extent of this surveillance, public outrage is limited and mild. The scale of data collection and tracking is not a national let alone a global scandal. According to Exposed, are appetites are too well satisfied and our attentions too distracted. Harcourt prods us to practice digital disobedience, lest we will remain in a digital mesh that will only continue to restrict our privacy and anonymity underneath its beautiful, shiny suit. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How is youth culture changing in a globalised city? In Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Transformations in a Global City Malcolm James, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, introduces the concept of Urban Multiculture as a framework for understanding his ethnographic research in East London. The book considers memory, territory and cultural practice, thinking through how the politics of class and race, alongside the lived experience of young people in the area, are being reconfigured by technology. This reconfiguration takes place in the context of global flows of people and culture, in a contested and transforming East London. The book demonstrates the importance of ethnographic research, both to how we understand and do politics, and to how we understand the contemporary city. It will be of interested to any scholar of urban studies, as well as those working on youth, race and class. Dave OBrien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

“A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire.” This axiom encapsulates both the approach and dedication exhibited by Fred Ross during the five decades he spent organizing impoverished and disenfranchised communities throughout the country. In America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2016), Gabriel Thompson provides the first biography of Ross, one of the most influential, albeit virtually unknown, activists and organizers in American history. Radicalized by his experiences working with impoverished Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression and interned Japanese Americans during World War II, Ross developed an insatiable desire to stand up for those “kept out” of mainstream society. He spent the majority of his career building Latino political power across the state of California aiding in the establishment of the Community Services Organization (CSO) and the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), two of the most progressive Mexican American organizations of the post-war and Civil Rights eras. Harnessing a distrust for established institutional structures and middle-class do-gooders, Ross sought to empower communities by developing community leadership from the bottom-up. Above all, Ross believed in the power of ordinary people working together to make democracy work for them. Preferring to work behind the scenes, Ross indelibly shaped the trajectory of American history as his philosophy and tactics continue to be used by community organizations, labor unions, and political campaigns to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Pedro Garcia de Leon, Policy Analyst for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), joins New Books in Education to discuss the organizations new data website, gpseducation.oecd.org. The new site streamlines all of OECDs educational data into one easily searchable location. It even provides customizable data graphics that can be used in presentations or shared on social media. The team at OECD hopes that educational researchers, policymakers, or anyone interested in education will find the site useful to access this wealth of data. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (Verso Books, 2015), Linsey McGoey proposes a new way of discussing philanthropy and, in doing so, revives associated historical debates often overlooked at present: from the ethics of clinical trials to industrial labor organizing in the early 20th century to global financial regulation. Tracing theological and industrial origins, among others, of what is now the field of philanthropy, Dr. McGoey asks how these institutions fit into the larger global economy. More broadly, McGoey suggests that capitalism has become the bedrock of many philanthropic social change efforts, reflected in the terms philanthrocapitalism, impact investment, and social enterprise among others. What, then, are the most appropriate questions to ask about regulation, morality, well-being, accountability, and profitability? No Such Thing As A Free Gift starts by examining the industry in the language of monopolies, investments, regulation, taxes, and democratic participation. Political philosophy and economic justice bookend several of the book’s core arguments, aiming to revisit earlier debates on the relationship between private wealth and the public good, often insisting that these questions are not only relevant to the current philanthropic landscape, but dictate it. While the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the unapologetic focus of the book, its chapters frame an important set of questions about the role of transnational, largely undemocratic institutions, in local and global policy-making. Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science & technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Amman, Jordan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Peter K. Enns is the author of Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Enns is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University. The rise of mass incarceration in the United States is one of the most critical outcomes of the last half-century. Incarceration Nation combines close analysis of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon’s presidential campaigns with 60 years of data analysis. In contrast to conventional wisdom, Enns shows that over this time period, politicians responded to an increasingly punitive public by pushing policy in a more punitive direction. The book also shows that media coverage of rising crime rates fueled the public’s attitudes. More recently, a decline in public punitiveness helps explain the current bipartisan calls for criminal justice reform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In New Mexico, before World War Two, Catholic sisters in full habits routinely taught in public schools. In her fascinating new book, Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2012), Dr. Kathleen Holscher explores how this curious situation arose and how this partnership between public schools and female religious orders was brought to an end by the court case Zellers v. Huff. Through a sensitive and rich exploration of diverse sources, including trial transcripts and her own interviews, Holscher captures the complex ways people in New Mexico and the wider United States understood religious freedom and the proper relationship between church and state while constructing a fascinating and ultimately moving narrative of division and reconciliation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The earthquake that shook Haiti on January 12, 2010 killed and destroyed the homes of hundreds of thousands of people. Mark Schuller‘s book Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti (Rutgers University Press, 2016) takes readers into the temporary camps in Port au Prince and offers a searing critique of the NGOs and aid organizations that organized relief efforts. Despite good intentions, the assumptions and practices of many of those organizations all too frequently resulted in the separation of families, sexual violence, and a continuation of racist hierarchies. And yet Schuller finds some success stories amidst the continuing tragedy. This is a necessary read for anyone interested in the complexities of humanitarianism, in US-Haiti relations, and in the politics of catastrophe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King are the authors of Fed Power: How Finance Wins (Oxford UP, 2016). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Government in the Hubert H. Humphrey School and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. King is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford. Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King’s Fed Power follows the Federal Reserve Banks historic development from the 19th century to its current position as the most important institution in the American economy, possessing considerable autonomy to intervene in private markets. Despite its power and considerable resources, Jacobs and King claim that the Fed was asleep at the wheel when the recent economic crisis hit. The Fed acted swiftly to contain the crisis, but in the process exposed its strong favoritism. The authors dissect how the Fed’s programs during the Great Recession funneled enormous sums to a select few in the finance industry while leaving Main Street businesses adrift and millions of homeowners underwater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Urban zoos are both popular and imperiled. They are sites of contestation, but what are those contests about? In his new book, American Zoo: A Sociological Safari(Princeton, 2015), ethnographer David Grazian tracks the competing missions of zoos as site of education, entertainment, philanthropy, and work. Grazian coins the term nature making to describe the process through which people assert and police an imagined division between nature and culture. On his sociological safari as a dung-shoveling, insect-eating volunteer at two urban zoos, Grazian observes how a range of stakeholders including visitors, employees, and corporate donors all participate in nature-making. Yet these groups make nature in different, patterned ways, which spawns everyday controversies as well as broader struggles to manage zoos rival missions. These contradictions shape what people learn in zoos (no evolution, please), how they imagine distant people and places (often crudely), and how species, both human and nonhuman, interact in zoos and in the wider world. American Zoo affirms the importance of urban ethnography for studies of organizations, science, and culture. Plus, in an age of irony, the book is constructive not only critical. With both laughter and bite, Grazian models how to sustain ambivalence as well as hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Few social justice struggles have captivated recent political history like the broad Black Lives Matter movement. From the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore to campaign rally interruptions of leading politicians, we have seen people speak up in outrage about injustices of policing, racist violence, wealth inequality and much more. What does this cycle of struggle have to do with the history of capitalism? In addition to these questions, our guest today, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, asks “Can the conditions created by institutional racism be transformed within the existing capitalist order?. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation was recently published by Haymarket Books. Republished with permission from Betsy Beasley and David Stein’s Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How are humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect changing in the current international political scene? In Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (3rd ed., Polity Press, 2016), Thomas G. Weiss (The Graduate Center, CUNY) explores the past, present, and future of these phenomena. The book offers a synthesis of conceptual debates, case studies, and historical analysis in exploring the constantly evolving theory and practice of humanitarian intervention. It also discusses that way that transformations in how wars are fought and in the identity and operations of humanitarian organizations impact prospects for intervention. The interview covers the history of humanitarian intervention and the emergence of the ‘responsibility to protect’ norm, the role of the UN and of humanitarian organizations in relation to intervention, shifting understandings of sovereignty, the expansion of what is understood to constitute a threat to international peace and security, the present situation in Syria, and much more. — John McMahon is a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he has also completed the Women’s Studies Certificate. He is a Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman professor of history at Vanderbilt University. His book The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016) interprets the New Deal as a massive but unstable experiment from the main of American political culture. Against arguments that the New Deal was the product of the American penchant for reform, Cowie asserts that it was a remarkable historical detour. The Great Depression and WWII were specific historical circumstances that wrought a short-lived effort for central government intervention in securing collective economic rights. Unions flourished, industrial workers gained job security and good wages, and the country enjoyed a relative amount of political cohesion. Multiple legislative measures and the growth of unions offered a countervailing power against corporate wealth accumulation and promised a bright economic future. Several enduring fissures in political culture would all but undo the New Deal after the 1970s. The long tensions over immigration, religious and racial hostility, the frailty of unions, and the ideology of Jeffersonian individualism remained and assured that the new interventionist role for the state would not last. By examining the birth of New Deal and its decline, Cowie locates a legacy of individual rights that stood against its long-term viability. As the central government has continued to expand under free market ideology, collective initiatives are being led at the local and state level by a cross-class neo-progressivism organizing labor and advocating for immigrants and other minorities. While the New Deal gave way to free market ideology, the future may lie in a new imaginary rising from below. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Eben Kirksey new book asks and explores a series of timely, important, and fascinating questions: How do certain plants, animals, and fungi move among worlds, navigate shifting circumstances, and find emergent opportunities? When do new species add value to ecological associations, and when do they become irredeemably destructive? When should we let unruly forms of life run wild, and when should we intervene?…Which creatures are flourishing, and which are failing, at the intersection of divided forces, competing political projects, and diverse market economies? Amid widespread environmental destruction, with radical changes taking place in ecosystems throughout the Americas, where can we find hope? Emergent Ecologies (Duke University Press, 2015) takes readers on an adventure through the Americas stopping over in ecosystems, laboratories, art exhibits, forests, and more in Panama, New York, Maine, Florida, Costa Rica to tell a story about the practices of worldmaking by ants, frogs, fungi, and other ontological amphibians. This is an exuberant and sensitively-written multispecies ethnography that is also a pleasure to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman are the authors of Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2016). Potter is a former health insurance executive, is the author of Deadly Spin, and is a regular contributor for the Huffington Post and HealthInsurance.org. Penniman is the executive director of Issue One. In Nation on the Take, Potter and Penniman catalogue the enormous amount of money spent on politics in the U.S. Over $6 billion spent on the 2012 election and over $3 billion spent annually on lobbying. From lobbying to campaign contributions, they argue that big money has corrupted the countrys democratic institutions altering everything from health care to food to banking. But Potter and Penniman arent cynics, they suggest that numerous legislative and legal fixes could greatly change the direction the country is headed. This podcast interview was recorded by Heath Brown, assistant professor of public policy, City University of New York, John Jay College and The Graduate Center. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

All of us are familiar with multiple-choice tests. They may be the one thing that you can find in kindergarten classrooms, college courses, and workplace training programs. But why are they so common? Multiple-choice tests may be the simplest and easiest way to see if someone knows something — or at least that someone probably knows something. No one would contend that this form of assessment moves beyond the lowest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy — remembering and understanding. Of course, we want students — and employees — who can do more than that. What kinds of assessments can measure whether someone can apply, analyze, evaluate, or create something? How would teachers prepare students for those evaluations? How would schools promote those practices? In Transforming Schools: Using Project-Based Learning, Performance Assessment, and Common Core Standards (Jossey-Bass, 2015), Bob Lenz and co-authors Justin Wells and Sally Kingston outline a series of practices designed to promote higher levels of cognition as well as the means to implement them school wide. Wells joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work with Envision Schools on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @jusowells. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

March Madness is big business. Each year the NCAA collects $700 million for television rights to the men’s college basketball tournament, under the terms of a 14-year, $10.8 billion contract with CBS and Turner Broadcasting. The two networks, in turn, bring in just over a billion dollars each year in advertising revenue. And it’s estimated that over nine billion dollars changes hands in bets every year, as some 40 million Americans fill out their brackets to predict the outcome of all 67 games in the three-week tournament. And this is “amateur” sports. In his new book Changing the Playbook: How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports (University of Illinois Press, 2015), historian Howard Chudacoff describes the key turning points that led to today’s big-money world of college sports. Focusing on the decades since World War II, Howard shows how college football, rather than basketball, led to the unchecked power of coaches, athletic directors, and wealthy boosters that we see today. He also explains the NCAA’s rise to authority over college sports, a place now sealed by its control of the March Madness billions. There are plenty of screeds out there against the money and corruption in college sports. But as a historian of sport and a former university representative to the NCAA, Howard offers a different take – a well-researched and illuminating history that is both critical of school administrators and the NCAA but also appreciative of athletics at American universities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Teenagers live in their phones. As an educator you can try to pull them away or meet them where they are. The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) urges educators to meet teens on their must-have device. Author Benjamin Castleman of the University of Virginia shows how text messaging combined with insights from behavioral science―more specifically the fields of behavioral economics and social psychology―can be leveraged to help students complete assignments, perform to their full potential on tests, and choose schools and colleges where they are well positioned for success. In his own research, Castleman has studied how to use personalized text messages to reduce “summer melt,” in which up to 40 percent of high school graduates who have been accepted to college, mostly from underserved communities, fail to show up for the fall semester. Behavioral strategies extend beyond texting and even beyond smartphone technology. By focusing on behavioral changes, Castleman demonstrates that small tweaks in how we ask questions, design applications, and tailor reminders can lead to better decision making and have remarkable impacts on student and school success. The 160-Character Solution makes a broader case for employing these behavioral strategies to improve educational outcomes from preschool all the way to college. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Everyone hates being underestimated. We want to feel included without others showing us condescension. At the same time, no one wants to be overestimated. We want to feel challenged without others overwhelming us. We recognize that children can be frustrated or disengaged, but we often fail to see that their feelings and behaviors are caused by the same things that stir up these feelings in adults — flawed assumptions about their abilities and interests. What if kids are more capable cognitively than we think? What if we demand too much of them pragmatically? Nowadays, we simultaneously adultify children and infantalize them, depending on the situation. But what if we have those situations backwards? In The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups (Viking, 2016), Erika Christakis shares her insights gleaned from years working with young children as a parent, preschool teacher, and preschool director. Christakis joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work on her website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with her on Twitter at @ErikaChristakis. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

When adults today look back on their time as children, many of their memories may come from moments when they were engaged in free play with kids in their neighborhood — exploring creeks, riding bikes, and playing pick-up sports. Moments like these, occurring outside of adult-imposed structures, put children in a position to make decisions, take risks, and navigate social relationships. Now parents are much more likely to organize playdates on behalf of their children or push them into organized sports and summer camps. But do these interactions provide the same kinds of learning experiences? If parents value free play, what choice do they have? In Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood into a Place for Play (Free Play Press, 2012), Mike Lanza describes how individual families can establish hangout spaces for kids in order to foster self-reliance and joy for their children and build community with their neighbors. Lanza joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work on his website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @playborhood. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How is the medical profession regulated in a ‘risk society’. This is the core question of John M. Chamberlain‘s Medical Regulation, Fitness to Practice and Revalidation: A Critical Introduction (Policy Press, 2015). Chamberlain, an associate professor of medical criminology at the University of Southampton, explores both the history of the medical profession as well as recent attempts to regulate and manage medicine’s relationship with society. The book focuses on how practitioners are judged to be fit, or not, to practice, in the context of both transformations of the profession and high profile scandals. The text brings together an analysis of the impact of new modes of regulation, particularly in terms of numbers of doctors sanctioned for poor practice, with theories of the sociology of professions and risk society. Focused on the UK, the book has important global implications and is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary medical practice, as well as those working on professions, risk and sociology more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Nadim Bakhshov joins the New Books in Network to discuss his book Against Capitalist Education: What is Education for? (Zero Books, 2015). The book posits new alternatives to educational thought and philosophy through an innovated, yet classic, style of dialogue between two characters, John and George, whom both channel philosophers, intellectuals, and great thinkers in history. You can connect to the guest via his Twitter at @nadimbakhshov or website, and also listen to his podcast on the subject here. For questions or comments on the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect to the host at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

El Sistema, the massive Venezuelan youth orchestra program, has been hailed in some quarters as the next big idea in music education (if not as the savior of classical music itself). Any who have found the press coverage of El Sistema suspiciously rosy, however, will find quite another account in Geoffrey Baker‘s engrossing and at times sharply critical book, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (Oxford University Press, 2014). Baker takes an ethnographic approach to El Sistema, investigating the daily lives and experiences of students and teachers, while simultaneously drawing on recent research in music pedagogy to subject the structure and history of the program to an ideological critique. El Sistema describes itself as an organization devoted to the “pedagogical, occupational, and ethical rescue” of children through orchestral music, dedicated to protecting and healing the most vulnerable ranks of Venezuelan society. To this, Baker raises troubling questions. Is it really the case that the average student in El Sistema comes from a precarious economic background? Supposing that musical training can foster social development, is the symphony orchestra, with its rigid hierarchies of command, really the best way to train model citizens? And in the long run, can Venezuela — or indeed, any country — provide long term employment for such a large cohort of professionally trained musicians? Further Listening/Viewing/Reading: Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra here. Lawrence Scripp’s interview with Luigi Mazzocchi: “The Need to Testify: A Venezuelan Musician’s Critique of El Sistema and his Call for Reform” (Full version here) (Shorter, journalistic version here) https://van-us.atavist.com/all-that-matters Geoffrey Baker’s El Sistema blog here. Special issue of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education on El Sistema here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

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 of middle class society. Ultimately despite so much attention given to other sociological categories, such as class or gender, when thinking about education race remains vitally important. This conclusion, alongside its wealth of empirical material and highly accessible style, make it essential reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy