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Mothers who homeschool their children constantly face judgmental questions about their choices, and yet the homeschooling movement continues to grow with an estimated 1.5 million American children now schooled at home. These children are largely taught by stay-at-home mothers who find that they must tightly manage their daily schedules to avoid burnout and maximize their relationships with their children, and that they must sustain a desire to sacrifice their independent selves for many years in order to savor the experience of motherhood. This book is the first comprehensive look into the lives of homeschooling mothers. Drawing on rich data collected through eight years of fieldwork and dozens of in-depth interviews, the book examines the intense effects of the emotional and temporal demands that homeschooling places on mothers' lives, raising profound questions about the expectations of modern motherhood and the limits of parenting.

Police officers, armed security guards, surveillance cameras, and metal detectors are common features of the disturbing new landscape at many of today's high schools. You will also find new and harsher disciplinary practices: zero-tolerance policies, random searches with drug-sniffing dogs, and mandatory suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, despite the fact that school crime and violence have been decreasing nationally for the past two decades. While most educators, students, and parents accept these harsh policing and punishment strategies based on the assumption that they keep children safe, this book argues that we need to think more carefully about how we protect and punish students. The book shows that these policies lead schools to prioritize the rules instead of students, so that students' real problems—often the very reasons for their misbehaviour—get ignored. The book demonstrates that the policies we have zealously adopted in schools across the country are the opposite of the strategies that are known to successfully reduce student misbehavior and violence. As a result, contemporary school discipline is often unhelpful, and can be hurtful to students in ways likely to make schools more violent places. Furthermore, those students who are most at-risk of problems in schools and dropping out are the ones who are most affected by these counterproductive policies. U.S. schools and students can and should be safe, and this book offers real strategies for making them so.

This Is Our School! provides a compelling ethnographic account of the ways various local educational justice movements wrestle with neoliberal education reform in one national hot spot for educational experimentation: Denver, Colorado. From the walkouts protesting the closure of neighborhood schools in low-income Black communities, to the resistance of White middle-class gentrifiers to school choice, to the carefully constructed campaigns of Latinx and immigrant-based community nonprofits, this book investigates the successes and setbacks of these various movements as they attempt to change the direction of one local city school system. Community movements matter to the outcomes of neoliberal school reform: they help to shape the mechanics of school choice in a city, they help to determine which charter schools will be opened and which will be replicated, and they push districts to reinvest in particular neighborhood schools. At the same time, this book demonstrates how these singular movement victories are ultimately constrained by their inability to join forces into more formidable and diverse movement coalitions for urban livability. The profound racial and class divides between educational justice movement groups vying for power in the same city ultimately limit the capacity for communities to take control of urban school reform, even when reforms like school choice and school closures remain so unpopular with so many communities. Ultimately, This Is Our School! reveals how grassroots organizing can steer elite education reforms toward local visions for more just schools and livable cities, and how and why it falls short.

This is a book about worldschooling and the families who educate their young children while traveling the world. Adopted primarily by white, middle-class parents from the Global North, worldschooling represents a new kind of life strategy, one that starts with seeing the world as their children’s classroom, but extends to the way worldschoolers parent, perform family life, work digitally and remotely, create communities online and on the road, and negotiate a sense of belonging and global citizenship on the move. While worldschooling appears to be a countercultural practice, it is actually emblematic of the mobile lifestyles that are becoming more common in contemporary society as individuals search for the “good life” in uncertain times. Based on a “mobile virtual ethnography” of traveling families, the book illustrates how this mobile lifestyle project is interwoven with the new individualism of late modernity, the new technical and economic arrangements of neoliberal capitalism, and the new uncertainties of life in a risk society. Each chapter details the strategies worldschooling parents deploy to live a good and morally justifiable life under the turbulent conditions of late modernity while preparing their children to thrive in an uncertain future. This analysis reveals that mobile lifestyles do not transcend social hierarchies, but introduce new mechanisms of distinction. Instead of transmitting economic capital to their children, worldschooling parents secure their children’s position of privilege in an uncertain world by equipping them with new forms of social, emotional, and cultural capital derived through mobility.