The politics of American education

1. The politics of education and the politics of knowledge : Educational governance and competing voices ; What do people talk about when they talk about schools? ; From the local to the global in school governance ; Civil society and schooling ; Politicians and educational ideologies ; The education business: making money and influencing schools ; Politics of school finance and the economics of education ; Global education politics and the United States ; Human capital: dominant global education ideology ; The human capital education paradigm 2. What do people talk about when they talk about schools? : What do politicians talk about when they talk about schools? ; What does the media talk about when it talks about schools? ; What do parents talk about when they talk about schools? ; What do the world's richest man and foundation talk about when they talk about schools? ; What do teachers talk about when they talk about schools? ; What do school administrators talk about when they talk about schools? ; What do Black and Latino educators talk about when they talk about schools? ; What do students talk about when they talk about schools? ; So what do people talk about when they talk about schools? 3. From the local to the global in school governance : Forms of representation ; State governance ; Federal government ; Federal influence and the race to the top ; Local control: school boards ; Local control: mayoral governance ; Patterns in local politics of education ; Dominated communities ; Factional communities ; Pluralistic communities ; Inert communities ; Educational governance in the United States ; Global influences ; Civil society ; School governance and ideology 4. Civil society and schooling : Power, money, and civil society ; Types of associations ; Special interest groups ; Foundations and think tanks: America's shadow government ; Foundations as shadow educational policy-makers ; Think tanks as shadow educational policy-makers ; Professional organizations ; Teachers unions ; A thousand points of light 5. Politicians and educational ideologies : Cultural conservatism and American exceptionalism ; Liberal cultural values and multiculturalism ; Cultural conservatives, moral instruction, and evolution ; Cultural liberals and moral values ; Free markets and school choice ; Liberals and regulated markets ; Cultural conservatives: poverty is a matter of character in a free market ; Cultural liberals: poverty and equal educational opportunity ; Human capital and alternative ideologies

6. The education business: making money and influencing schools : The publishing industry, Texas, and open-source texts ; Texas' politics and textbook publishing ; The politics of open-source textbooks ; For-profit and franchised educational services ; Educational management organizations: charter schools ; Supplementary education services: the shadow education system ; Franchising the shadow education system ; Multinational testing corporations ; Ideology and the education business

7. Politics of school finance and the economics of education : Does money matter? ; Economic self-interest and school finance ; The politics of unequal funding and school finance ; Judicial involvement in school finance: equity ; Judicial involvement in school finance: adequacy ; Federal, state, and local spending on education ; Financial crisis: how should educational monies be distributed? ; Educational administrators ; Teachers ; Framework for understanding the politics of school finance ; Who should pay? ; How should educational monies be distributed? ; How should money for education be collected? ; How much money should be spent on education? ; School finance in a global context ; The economics of schooling in the global labor market

8. Global education politics and the United States : Benchmarking global standards and tests ; Global academic olympics: OECD and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) ; The World Bank: human capital in developing nations ; United Nations and the World Bank: global networks ; Millennium goals, global networks, and human capital education ; Brain gain and brain drain: human capital and multiculturalism ; The global education business ; The global cloud

9. Political control of education in a democratic society: proposal for amendment to U.S. Constitution : The problem of majority rule ; The power of special interest groups ; The political use of schools ; Education amendment to U.S. Constitution ; Globalization and national systems of education.