CHAPTER: 1: SCHOOLING: WRESTLING WITH TRADITION
The Teaching Challenge of the 21st Century
Metaphors and Myths That Shape American Schools
Hope and Struggle in a Postmodern World
Digging Deeper
CHAPTER 2: TRADITIONAL LEARNING THEORIES: IQ, TRAINING, & TRANSMISSION
The Bell Curve: Debates Rage about Intelligence and Learning
Changing Conceptions of Learning
Intelligence, Learning, and Merit: You Get What You Deserve
Learning as Behavioral Training
Schooling as Behavioral Training
The Limits of Transmission and Training
Digging Deeper
CHAPTER 3: CONTEMPORARY LEARNING THEORIES: PROBLEM-SOLVING & UNDERSTANDING
Learning as Thinking and Understanding
The Cognitive Revolution
Learning is Social and Cultural
Why Do Children Learn?
Cognition, Culture, and Teaching to Change the World
Digging Deeper
CHAPTER 4: THE CURRICULUM: WHAT SHOULD STUDENTS LEARN?
Why Do We Have to Learn This? Traditions and Debates
The Struggle for a 21st Century Curriculum
Late 20th Century Opposition to Constructivism and Multiculturalism
Struggling for a Socially Just Curriculum
Digging Deeper
CHAPTER 5: CURRICULUM: THE SUBJECT MATTERS
What Knowledge? Whose Knowledge? Knowledge for Whom?
Mathematics
English Language Arts
Social Studies
Science
The Struggle for the Subject Matter
Digging Deeper
CHAPTER 6: INSTRUCTION & ASSESSMENT: CLASSROOMS AS LEARNING COMMUNITIES
Seeking a Sociocultural Pedagogy
Confidence in a Context of Difference
Active and Social Instruction
Assessment for Learning
No Easy Recipes
Digging Deeper
CHAPTER 7: CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT: BUILDING CARING & DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITIES
Management, Discipline, and Control: Lasting Legacies
Caring and Democracy-A Second Legacy
Socially Just Classrooms
Like Everything Else in Teaching; It's a Struggle
Digging Deeper
CHAPTER 8: GROUPING & CATEGORICAL PROGRAMS: CAN SCHOOLS TEACH ALL STUDENTS WELL?
Making Distinctions
History, Diversity, and Homogeneous Grouping
Contemporary Grouping Practices: Ability by Many Other Names
Dilemmas with Homogeneous Grouping
Controversy Surrounds Homogeneous Grouping
Accommodating Diversity without Sorting
Technical Skills, Norms and Beliefs, Politics and Power
The Struggle for Heterogeneous Grouping
Digging Deeper
CHAPTER 9: THE SCHOOL CULTURE: WHERE GOOD TEACHING MAKES SENSE
Structures, Norms, and Politics Enable and Constrain
Access and Opportunity to Learn
Expectations and Press
Caring
Connections with the Community
Conditions For Teaching Efficacy
Necessary, But Not Sufficient
Digging Deeper
CHAPTER 10: TEACHING TO CHANGE THE WORLD

Considering the values and politics that pervade education, this book asks questions about how conventional thinking and practice came to be and who benefits from them. It pays attention to inequalities associated with race, social class, language, gender, and other social categories and looks for alternatives to the inequalities.