New Books In Public Policy

A decade and a half of exhausting wars, punishing economic setbacks, and fast-rising rivals has called into question America’s fundamental position and purpose in world politics. Will the US continue to be the only superpower in the international system? Should it continue advancing the world-shaping grand strategy it has followed since the dawn of the Cold War? Or should it “come home” and focus on its internal problems? The recent resurgence of isolationist impulses has made the politics surrounding these questions increasingly bitter. In America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2016), Stephen G. Brooks (Dartmouth College) and William C. Wohlforth (Dartmouth College) take stock of these debates and provide a powerful defense of American globalism. They stress that world politics since end of World War Two has been shaped by two constants: America’s position as the most powerful state, and its strategic choice to be deeply engaged in the world. Ever since,

With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to find precursors to an unregulated market, corrupt bankers, and severe economic inequality. The comparisons are often too simple, however. In their new book, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (Oxford University Press, 2015), Barbara Hahn and Bruce Baker examine capitalism at the turn of the century, telling a more nuanced story about the cotton market, politics, and regulation. The Cotton Kings examines the ups and downs of the cotton futures market, explaining how cotton brokers were able to keep cotton prices low by controlling information. This enriched the brokers, but impoverished farmers. A small group of brokers in New Orleans successfully cornered the market in the early 1900s, in effect, self-regulating the cotton market and raising prices for years. T

In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2015), Holly Allen offers a fascinating analysis of how notions of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship were challenged and defined during the Great Depression and into the war years. By focusing on popular and official narratives, she provides new insights into the questions of masculinity, femininity, gender outsiders, and sexual outcasts, connecting all these categories with federal policies and exploring them in the New Deal context. In this New Books in Gender Study’s podcast we focus exactly on these arguments, discussing further how these analytic categories correlated to each other during the 1930s. Allen argues that cultural representations of gender, sexuality, and race had practical consequences for federal policies, and vice versa. The book is well theoretically informed, based on the variety of sources, but still accessible to read with a lot of examples and compelling stories. Learn more

Darian M. Parker joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling (Lexington Books, 2015). Through an ethnographic lens, Parker provides an anthropological glimpse into a New York City public school that is considered to be failing. Despite being rooted in a strong theoretical framework, the book should be accessible to anyone interested in education or policy making because of the familiar narrative laid out in a relatable manner. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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, prescri

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 fi

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 spec

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 ou

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

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 bo

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

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

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.-Mexi

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

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

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/adcho

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

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 t

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