Time to go hunting for books for the people on your Christmas list, and I have some recommendations for you if there are people on your list who care about public education (and really, everybody should).
Before we start shopping, let me also direct your attention to Bookshop.org, an online vendor set up to benefit local independent booksellers instead of, say, giving Jeff Mezos his next gazillion dollars. You can also use it to locate a local bookstore and then shop even more directly.
Now, here's my handful or recommendations for this year.
This book does not actually ship for another week, but based on the fact that it's edited by Jesse Hagopian and Denisha Jones, my copy is already on order.
Andre Perry brings a really unique collection of hats to this work, from Brookings scholar to education journalist, and this work is an impressive distillation of it all. At some points, it's a powerful personal reflection on his own experience, and at others, a scholarly look at how Blacks in the US have had value systematically stripped from them in ways that have lasting financial and social consequences. This book is huge help in understanding the how of racism in not just abstract or social ways, but in concrete, practical financial ways.
Schoolhouse Burning & The Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door
Schoolhouse Burning by Derek Black and A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider are two entirely separate books, but they make a perfect pairing. It enhances both to read them back to back.
Black is a legal scholar whose book traces the importance of education in this country as reflected CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The 2020 Edubook Christmas List