It seems like common sense that children do better when parents are actively involved in their schooling. But how well does the evidence stack up? The Broken Compass puts this question to the test in the most thorough scientific investigation to date of how parents across socioeconomic and ethnic groups contribute to the academic performance of K-12 children. The study's surprising discovery is that no clear connection exists between parental involvement and improved student performance.

Keith Robinson and Angel Harris assessed over sixty measures of parental participation, at home and in school. Some of the associations they found between socioeconomic status and educational involvement were consistent with past studies. Yet other results ran contrary to previous research and popular perceptions. It is not the case that Hispanic and African American parents are less concerned with education than other ethnic groups--or that "tiger parenting" among Asian Americans gets the desired results. In fact, many low-income parents across a wide spectrum want to be involved in their children's school lives, but they often receive little support from the school system. And for immigrant families, language barriers only worsen the problem.

While Robinson and Harris do not wish to discourage parents' interest, they believe that the time has come to seriously reconsider whether greater parental involvement can make much of a dent in the basic problems facing their children's education today. This provocative study challenges some of our most cherished beliefs about the role of family in educational success.

Reprimand a class comic, restrain a bully, dismiss a student for brazen attire--and you may be facing a lawsuit, costly regardless of the result. This reality for today's teachers and administrators has made the issue of school discipline more difficult than ever before--and public education thus more precarious. This is the troubling message delivered in Judging School Discipline, a powerfully reasoned account of how decades of mostly well-intended litigation have eroded the moral authority of teachers and principals and degraded the quality of American education.

Judging School Discipline casts a backward glance at the roots of this dilemma to show how a laudable concern for civil liberties forty years ago has resulted in oppressive abnegation of adult responsibility now. In a rigorous analysis enriched by vivid descriptions of individual cases, the book explores 1,200 cases in which a school's right to control students was contested.

Richard Arum and his colleagues also examine several decades of data on schools to show striking and widespread relationships among court leanings, disciplinary practices, and student outcomes; they argue that the threat of lawsuits restrains teachers and administrators from taking control of disorderly and even dangerous situations in ways the public would support.

In the modern world, success depends upon literacy, a fact especially true for deaf children who, if they read and write well, can take full advantage of e-mail, the Internet, and other communication innovations. Literacy and Your Deaf Child: What Every Parent Should Know provides parents with the means to ensure that their deaf or hard of hearing child becomes a proficient reader and writer. In nine chapters, parents will learn about the relationship of language to reading and writing, including the associated terminology, the challenges that deaf children face, and the role of schools. They’ll also learn activities that they can engage in at home that will strengthen their children’s reading and writing capabilities.

Literacy and Your Deaf Child begins by introducing some common concepts, among them the importance of parental involvement in a deaf child’s education. It outlines how children acquire language and describes the auditory and visual links to literacy. With this information, parents can make informed decisions regarding hearing aids, cochlear implants, speechreading, and sign communication, all of which can have a marked influence on their child’s language development. Parents will discover how to create environments at home and in their community for fostering their child’s literacy, especially in school by learning how to work closely with their child’s teachers. The book also refers throughout to the developmental link between American Sign Language and English literacy for children who use sign communication, making it the best guide available for all deaf children and their parents.

In her engaging study, Passing for Perfect,erin Khuê Ninh considers the factors that drove college imposters such as Azia Kim—who pretended to be a Stanford freshman—and Jennifer Pan—who hired a hitman to kill her parents before they found out she had never received her high school diploma—to extreme lengths to appear successful. Why would someone make such an illogical choice? And how do they stage these lies so convincingly, and for so long? 

These outlier examples prompt Ninh to address the larger issue of the pressures and difficulties of striving to be model minority, where failure is too ruinous to admit. Passing for Perfect insists that being a “model minority” is not a “myth,” but coded into one’s programming as an identity—a set of convictions and aspirations, regardless of present socioeconomic status or future attainability—and that the true cost of turning children into high-achieving professionals may be higher than anyone can bear.  

Ninh’s book codifies for readers the difference between imposters who are con artists or shysters and those who don’t know how to stop passing for perfect.

Just how much freedom of speech should high school students have? Does giving children and adolescents a far-reaching right of expression, without joining it to responsibility, ultimately result in an asylum that is run by its inmates?

Since the late 1960s, the United States Supreme Court has struggled to clarify the contours of constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech rights for students. But as this thought-provoking book contends, these court opinions have pitted students—and their litigious parents—against schools while undermining the schools’ necessary disciplinary authority.

In a clear and lively style, sprinkled with wry humor, Anne Proffitt Dupre examines the way courts have wrestled with student expression in school. These fascinating cases deal with political protest, speech codes, student newspapers, book banning in school libraries, and the long-standing struggle over school prayer. Dupre also devotes an entire chapter to teacher speech rights. In the final chapter on the 2007 “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case, she asks what many people probably wondered: when the Supreme Court gave teenagers the right to wear black armbands in school to protest the Vietnam War, just how far does this right go? Did the Court also give students who just wanted to provoke their principal the right to post signs advocating drug use?

Each chapter is full of insight into famous decisions and the inner workings of the courts. Speaking Up offers eye-opening history for students, teachers, lawyers, and parents seeking to understand how the law attempts to balance order and freedom in schools.

Research has shown that very young children can learn sign language before they learn to speak. Teach Your Tot to Sign: The Parents’ Guide to American Sign Language provides parents and teachers the opportunity to teach more than 500 basic American Sign Language (ASL) signs to their infants, toddlers, and young children. Hearing children, deaf children, and children with special needs can benefit from learning the elementary signs chosen for this handy pocket-size book. Young children who can communicate using simple signs become less frustrated and also bond in a special way with their parents. In teaching ASL to parents of toddlers and preschool teachers, author Stacy A. Thompson recognized the need for a book that could be used at home and in the classroom. Her book features fundamental signs of great appeal to young children and concise instructions on how to sign, including the critical importance of facial expression.

Teach Your Tot to Sign anticipates all of the common desires and interests of young children — food, pets, planes, trains, cars, and boats, games, holidays, vegetables, family — in short, nearly everything. Reflecting children’s endless curiosity, the vocabulary chosen ranges from signs for “baby,” “broken,” “clown,” “dinosaur,” “firefighter,” “gentle,” “hot,” “hurt,” “ketchup,” “pacifier,” “rooster,” “sad,” “spaghetti,” “wagon,” “water,” “wet,” to “you’re welcome,” and even “McDonalds.” This lively assortment of signs will help every child convey earlier in their development their thoughts, feelings, and desires to their parents and teachers.