  | Book Details Title: Sacred Scriptures |
Book DescriptionAbout the Author Yahwah Apostolic Ministries Smithfield OH is an assembly which comprises of the Oneness believers of the God of Yisrael – (YHWH), the Redeemer and Savior of mankind. Read more Customers Review: Everyone should own this Book! It has the Sacred Name of God and Savior restored in both the Old and New Testament (Tanakh & New Blood covenant). Readers should first read the Preface with Introduction that explains about the Sacred name of God (Elohim) and about the Appendix which has the Study Guides to help readers with a better understanding of the Scriptures. From Genesis to Revelation it has English and Hebrew transliterated Names and explains very well.
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Senin, 29 Juni 2020
[PDF] Download Sacred Scriptures by Yahwah Apostolic Ministries | Free EBOOK PDF English
2 reviews [PDF] Download Shadowshaper Legacy (The Shadowshaper Cypher) by Daniel José Older | Free EBOOK PDF English
 | Book Details Title: Shadowshaper Legacy (The Shadowshaper Cypher) |
Book DescriptionReview Praise for ShadowshaperA Top Ten YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults SelectionA Top Ten ALA Quick PickA Kirkus Prize FinalistAn Andre Award NomineeA New York Times Notable Children’s BookAn NPR Best Book of the YearA Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year”In the best urban fantasy, the city is not just a backdrop, but functions as a character in its own right . . . That is certainly true in Daniel José Older’s magnificent Shadowshaper, which gives us a Brooklyn that is vital, authentic, and under attack . . . Older is able to infuse Shadowshaper with the spirit of Brooklyn in the summer, where the possibility of magic hangs shimmering in the air. This is a world that readers cannot help wanting to live in and, as with all great urban fantasies, harboring a suspicion that perhaps we already do.” — Holly Black, New York Times bestselling author of The Coldest Girl in Coldtown and The Iron Trial, in the New York Times Book Review”The strength of Older’s tale is in his meticulous attention to the details of the life of a brown-skinned, natural-haired Puerto Rican teenage girl. Older’s storytelling is rich enough to warrant such treatment, because this is a world that will stay with readers long after the last page.” — Los Angeles Times”Older’s book is a first-rate example of how representation, diversity and themes of social justice and identity can be skillfully woven into a narrative — not so that they disappear, but so that the story pivots on them in a way that is authentic, exciting, and ultimately satisfying.” — Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing* “Warm, strong, vernacular, dynamic — a must.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review* “Excellent diverse genre fiction in an appealing package.” — School Library Journal, starred review* “What makes Older’s story exceptional is the way Sierra belongs in her world, grounded in family, friends, and an awareness of both history and change.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review* “Smart writing with a powerful message that never overwhelms the terrific storytelling.” — Booklist, starred reviewPraise for Shadowhouse FallA Locus Award Finalist”Older takes the idea of fantasy as metaphor and smashes it to bits, bringing us to a Brooklyn steeped in magic that feels utterly real and punch-to-the-gut perilous. A powerful adventure that blurs the line between the real and the imagined in daring, breathtaking ways, Shadowhouse Fall is not only a thrilling hero’s journey, but a magical revolution on the page.” — Leigh Bardugo, New York Times bestselling author of Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom”Brilliant . . . A novel about Brooklyn, love, spirituality, family and something else. Something I can’t even explain but am enthralled by and want more of. This is the beauty and magic of Older’s writing — he leaves us openmouthed and speechless, asking ‘What just happened to me?!’ Loved this book.” — Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming”Shadowhouse Fall flips and reshuffles principles of light and darkness in stunning revelation after revelation. Older’s vivid ink and prose deftly obliterates any bounds between a tangible and a supernatural Brooklyn. I am still under its spell.” — Rita Williams-Garcia, three-time Coretta Scott King Author Award-winner”Older is a brilliant storyteller, and with sharp, smart, and hilarious dialogue and prose Shadowhouse Fall is a fresh, enthralling speculative novel for readers of all ages.” — Bredan Kiely, award-winning coauthor of All American Boys and critically acclaimed author of Tradition”I turned pages so quickly I got paper cuts.” — NPR”Older knows that today’s young people are just as magical as his characters.” — Teen Vogue* “Older paints a compelling picture of contemporary life for black and brown teens in cities: Afro-Latinx Sierra and her friends deal with police harassment and brutality, both on the streets of Bed-Stuy and at school, themes that feel especially timely and relevant . . . Older excels at crafting teen dialogue that feels authentic, and props to everyone involved for not othering the Spanish language. This second volume features a tighter plot and smoother pacing than the first, and the ending will leave readers eagerly awaiting the further adventures of Sierra and her friends. Lit.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review* “With the same keen eye for the power of art and a sly commentary on the insidious nature of racism and white supremacy — as well as a deft handle on zippy teenage banter and cinematic pacing — Older delivers a fantastic follow-up to his best-selling Shadowshaper (2015), which not only intensifies the stakes of the first book but expands the scope of his well-wrought, vivid world building… The expanding cast of well-rounded characters, clearly choreographed action, and foreshadowing of installments to come will have fantasy fans eagerly awaiting more of this dynamic, smart series.” — Booklist, starred review* “Exciting . . . Older has upped the ante with this second installment.” — School Library Journal, starred review”A stunning sequel that will leave fans clamoring for book three.” — Shelf Awareness Read more About the Author Daniel José Older has always loved monsters, whether historical, prehistorical, or imaginary. His debut series for young adults, the Shadowshaper Cypher, has earned starred reviews, the International Latino Book Award, and New York Times Notable Book and NPR Best Book of the Year picks, among other accolades. His debut middle-grade series, Dactyl Hill Squad, was named to the New York Times Notable Book list and to the NPR and Washington Post Best Book of the Year lists, among others. He has worked as a bike messenger, a waiter, and a teacher, and was a New York City paramedic for ten years. Daniel splits his time between Brooklyn and New Orleans. Read more Customers Review: What a way to conclude the series. There’s nothing more to say. This is one of the best series I’ve ever read. I don’t want to spoil it for you–just read the entire series. You will not be disappointed.
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Minggu, 28 Juni 2020
[PDF] Download We Will Rise: A True Story of Tragedy and Resurrection in the American Heartland by Steve Beaven | Free EBOOK PDF English
 | Book Details Title: We Will Rise: A True Story of Tragedy and Resurrection in the American Heartland |
Book DescriptionReview An Amazon Best Book of the Month: Biographies & Memoirs“This story of [the] Evansville men’s basketball team’s rebirth after the 1977 plane crash is tragic and inspiring.” —Sports Illustrated“The best stories about sports are about life, too…Beaven, who grew up in Evansville, crafts a beautiful story.” —Washington Post“This is a story of community resilience and a tribute not only to those who were lost but those who carried on.” —Courier & Press“We Will Rise is a heartwarming story of the spirit of this team, its fans, and a resilient community.” —Brooklyn Digest“This story exemplifies the resilience of the American heartland, where God-fearing people bear unspeakable pain and tragedy with grace and depth most of us cannot comprehend. The heart of Evansville beats like a basketball on hardwood with every word. You can almost hear the squeaking of high-top sneakers on the floor, the ear-splitting chirp of whistles and the quiet, gut-wrenching sobs of those who grieve. We Will Rise joins the pantheon of great sports books for one simple reason: it has very little to do with sports.” —Steve Eubanks, New York Times bestselling author of All American: Two Young Men, the 2001 Army-Navy Game and the War They Fought in Iraq“Riveting and very personal…Steven Beaven has written the last word on the tragic crash of the University of Evansville basketball team. More, though, he celebrates the rebirth rise of the program after the devastating events of that winter day in 1977. A must-read.” —Bob Kravitz, senior staff writer for The Athletic and former columnist for The Indianapolis Star“We Will Rise is an ode to spirit, to hope, to somehow carrying on after the greatest of heartbreaks. Steve Beaven’s masterful work is a true must-read.” —Jeff Pearlman, New York Times bestselling author and former senior writer for Sports Illustrated“Growing up in Indiana, I heard the stories about the crash that destroyed the young team at the heart of We Will Rise. But I learned so much more reading this book. Steve Beaven honors the players and coaches who lost their lives and tells the stories of their families trying to move forward in the face of unthinkable grief. Here is the best of what sports can mean to a community.” —Brad Stevens, head coach of the Boston Celtics Read more About the Author Steve Beaven is an Evansville native and a former staff writer at the Oregonian. His work has appeared in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two sons. Read more Customers Review: The author was born in 1967. Ten years later, the coach and basketball team at the local university were lost in a fiery plane crash. This book is his ode to the old team, the new team, and the small town that had to come to terms with and live through this disaster.BOTTOM LINE: Well written but so heavy on sports that in the end it’s really best suited for diehard sports fans. | |
[PDF] Download Democracy and Equality: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court (Inalienable Rights) by Geoffrey R. Stone | Free EBOOK PDF English
 | Book Details Title: Democracy and Equality: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court (Inalienable Rights) |
Book DescriptionReview “A full-throated, lucid, and utterly persuasive defense of the Warren Court and the constitutional principles it established: equality, liberty, dignity, and democracy. Stone and Strauss remind us of what constitutional law does at its best.” — David Cole, National Legal Director, ACLU, and author of Engines of Liberty“Most of what we think about with respect to the Warren Court comes in the size and shapes of legal cartoons. Even some serious scholars on the right and left dismiss the landmark cases that emerged from that court as the work of unmoored ideologues, legislating from the bench. In this eminently readable book, Geoffrey Stone and David Strauss, offer up a primer on the craft and methodology of the jurists who gave us the scaffolding of today’s desegregation, criminal justice, voting rights and free speech landscape. They prove that these signal achievements were not rooted in fanciful ideas; they are the very constitutional air we breathe, and they are under threat, now as never before. Only through this sober and deeply researched understanding of what the Warren Court did and how it was done, can we continue to fight for the vision of equality and fairness that it put into practice.”–Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Legal Editor, Slate“In a time when it has become all too fashionable to treat the work of the Warren Court as having diminishing relevance-and to treat that era’s legal doctrines as reflecting an unduly ambitious view of the role courts can play in securing justice and protecting representative government-Democracy and Equality offers a breath of fresh air. This eminently readable narrative brilliantly illuminates the possibilities still latent in our founding document by focusing on a dozen great controversies that the Court under Earl Warren resolved in a humane and progressive way while remaining faithful to the aspirations underlying our founding and animating the rebirth of the republic.”–Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School”In this wonderfully accessible book, Stone and Strauss take on the perennial claim that the Warren Court represents judicial ‘activism’ run amok. As they convincingly argue, although the Warren Court completely transformed the American legal landscape, it did so in ways that were entirely consistent with the logic and values of the Constitution and democratic society. Today, as we struggle to realize ‘a more perfect Union,’ Strauss and Stone’s powerful insights are both urgent and invaluable.”–Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law, NYU School of Law”A clear and very useful primer for the lay audience, but it is also informative and provocative for the seasoned constitutional lawyer… This is an important and interesting book for all of us.”–Law360“An excellent book… a worthy addition to those works that have explored the Supreme Court’s history and impact on our country.”–Chicago Daily Law Bulletin “Engaging and enlightening.”–The American Prospect Read more About the Author Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He has served as Dean of the University of Chicago Law School and as Provost of the University of Chicago, and is the author of many books on constitutional law, including Sex and the Constitution and Perilous Times.David A. Strauss is the Gerald Ratner Distinguished Service Professor of Law and the Faculty Director of the Supreme Court and Appellate Clinic at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important articles on constitutional law and of the influential book The Living Constitution. Read more Customers Review:The authors wrote this book to commemorate and reflect back on the Warren Court. Earl Warren served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1953 to 1969. 2019 was the 50th anniversary of Warren’s retirement. In this book, as David Cole noted in a cover jacket blurb, Strauss and Stone provide a “persuasive defense of the Warren Court and the constitutional principles it established: equality, liberty, dignity, and democracy.” As the authors argue, the justices on this Court did so while remaining true to he highest responsibilities and principles.The authors consider and reflect on twelve specific decisions handed down by the Warren Court and describe the importance of those decisions and how the Court decisions were well within the role of the judiciary.It is an important reminder of what role the Court can play and how it can be principled and even out the landscape for the powerful and the voiceless. It is a worthy addition to the Constitution scholarship that is out there, and a call subtly to the present Court. | |
[PDF] Download Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools by Diane Ravitch | Free EBOOK PDF English
 | Book Details Title: Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools |
Book DescriptionAbout the Author DIANE RAVITCH was born in Houston, Texas, and graduated from Wellesley College and Columbia University. She is a research professor of education at New York University and the author of eleven books. Ravitch is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1Disruption Is Not Reform!I started to write this book in the spring of 2018 at an unusual moment in our nation’s history. In state after state, tens of thousands of teachers walked out of their schools and marched to their state capitols to protest low pay, poor working conditions, and the persistent underfunding of public education. The walkouts and strikes continued into 2019, spreading from district to district and state to state. Teachers were marching not just for themselves but for the students they taught, who were in overcrowded classes, using obsolete textbooks, in long-neglected buildings. In the Republican-dominated states where the walkouts began, education spending had been sharply reduced in the previous decade. Faced with thousands of irate teachers and closed schools, legislators made concessions to placate the striking teachers, even in states where unions were weak and strikes were forbidden.Most commentators were shocked by teacher militancy. They never imagined that teachers would rise up spontaneously, but they did. Across the nation, teachers were demoralized by stagnant wages, budget cuts, soaring health care costs, crowded classrooms, punitive evaluation systems, attacks on teachers’ job security and pensions, and public funding of privately managed schools, which reduced the funding of public schools. Many teachers decided they could no longer remain in their chosen profession because a draconian standards-and-testing regime mandated by federal law stole weeks, sometimes months, from classroom instruction, distorted the goals of education, and made it impossible for them to teach with autonomy, passion, and creativity.Persistent insults and legislative attacks on the teaching profession and public schools caused many experienced teachers to abandon their classrooms long before they were due to retire, creating teacher shortages and causing a sharp drop in the number of applicants to teacher preparation institutions. At a time when fake “Reformers” were casting teachers as villains, the number of people entering the profession went into free fall. How can a nation educate its young without well-qualified, experienced teachers?The teacher walkouts were a nail in the coffin of what has falsely been called “education reform” for at least two decades. By the bold act of walking out in mass numbers and marching to their state capitols, even where doing so was forbidden by law, teachers were educating the public about the mean-spiritedness, ignorance, and shortsightedness behind the facade of “education reform.” Teachers were working second and third jobs to make ends meet. Some teachers were paid so little that they were eligible for government food stamps. Even with their low wages, teachers laid out or raised hundreds of dollars each year to buy essential school supplies for their students. These conditions, graphically illustrated in newspapers, magazines, and on websites, educated the public about the causes of widespread teacher shortages and the dramatic underfunding of public schools.This was the wreckage that the so-called “reform” movement had created by demonizing teachers as if they were adversaries of their students and treating them as malingerers who required constant evaluation lest they fail to do their duty. This was the damage inflicted on public schools, their students and teachers, by heedless billionaires who had decided to disrupt, reinvent, and redesign the nation’s public schools. This was the work of some of the richest people in the nation: the Walton family, Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, Michael Bloomberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, and a bevy of other billionaires, most of whom had made their fortunes on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, or in the tech industry.For nearly two decades, the “reformers” had promised a dramatic transformation in American education, based on their strategy of high-stakes testing, teacher evaluation by test scores, charter schools, and closing low-scoring public schools. They confidently claimed that they knew the answers to all the vexing problems in education. They asserted that they were leading the civil rights movement of our time, funded by billionaires, Wall Street titans, and the federal government, as if the elites would be leading a civil rights movement against the powerful (themselves!). They insisted that when their remedies were imposed, America’s test scores would soar to the top of international rankings. No longer would poor children be “trapped in failing schools.” No more would children’s success be determined by their ZIP code or social status. They all sang from a common hymnal about the failures of public education and proclaimed their certainty that they knew how to turn failure into high test scores for all. But despite the investment of billions of federal, state, local, and philanthropic dollars, these malign efforts came up empty. The leaders of this charade had confidently predicted that success was just beyond the horizon. But as so often happens with mirages, the horizon kept receding farther away. None of their promises and claims came true. Judged by their own chosen metrics—standardized test scores—the fake “reformers” failed.In this book, I will not call these activities and their leaders by the honorable word reform, which they have brazenly appropriated. The individuals and groups who promote test-based accountability, school closings, and school choice as remedies for low test scores are not reformers. What to call them? Others call them “deformers” or the “financial privatization cabal” or the “Destroy Public Education Movement” or “privateers.” Such groups and individuals often say their goal is to “disrupt” public education, and I think in this instance they have accurately named themselves. They are Disrupters. They are masters of chaos, which they inflict on other people’s children, without a twinge of remorse. They are most certainly not reformers, the title they have deceptively claimed. The old and true sense of the word “reform” has positive connotations; most people hear the word and think of “improvement,” “progress,” and “uplift.” This does not describe the current disruption movement, which is in fact a calculated, insidious, and munificently funded campaign to privatize America’s public schools, to break teachers’ unions, to tear apart communities, and to attack teacher professionalism. The rhetoric used by this campaign is so similar from place to place that I assume it was concocted by marketing and branding professionals to deceive the public. I will not allow the term “reform” to be hijacked by those who have a hidden agenda.Disrupters are proponents of privatization. They distrust the public sector. They don’t like local control. They like to close public schools. They belittle teachers. They use their vast resources to transfer public assets to the private sector and to demean those who teach our children despite their low wages and poor working conditions.Disrupters say that schools should be run like businesses. They think that students, teachers, principals, and schools need to be externally motivated by carrots and sticks, by bonuses and penalties, tied to standardized test scores. They believe that because businesses succeed by having private ownership, profit and loss statements, and data-driven decision making, so should schools. They believe that standardized testing is an essential tool for making objective decisions about which teachers are effective or ineffective and which schools should be rewarded or closed.The Disrupters view education as an entrepreneurial activity that should be “scalable” and should produce “return on investment.” They encourage new businesses to enter the education marketplace. The schools, once seen solely as institutions of teaching and learning, have been reimagined by corporations and entrepreneurs as places of commerce and profit. There is money to be made in selling tests, hardware, software, professional development, new curricula, new ways to analyze and utilize data, and consulting services for all of the above. There is money to be made by opening charter chains, buying real estate under one name and leasing it back to the new charter under another name, establishing related corporations to supply goods and services to one’s own charter schools, using the charter school’s credit card to fly first-class, eat in pricey restaurants, and buy luxury cars and clothing. Frequent conferences are convened to explore how equity investors can make a profit in the education industry. Many people have figured out how to make money from public education dollars, but these people are not teachers. Teachers meet their classes several times a day, do their jobs for an average wage of $60,000, far below the salaries of their peers with the same credentials in other professions in the same states. They are definitely not in education for the money.In the new era of Disruption, it seems quaint, antique actually, to speak of “love of learning” as a goal of education, to speak of education as personal development and preparation for citizenship in a democratic society. Where is the profit in such fuzzy goals? How could those be measured?The disruption and privatization movement was codified into law by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (passed by Congress in 2001 and signed by the president in 2002) and extended its control of state and local policy by Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program (2009). The marketing of Disruption reached a large national audience in 2010 with the release of the documentary Waiting for “Superman,” which falsely asserted that America’s public schools had failed, extolled the virtues of privately managed charter schools, and ridiculed public schools and their teachers.I wrote two books about the emergence of this new movement. The first appeared in 2010 and was called The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Having worked as assistant secretary of education for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the administration of President George H. W. Bush and for many years in some of the nation’s leading conservative think tanks, I had hoped that privatization and testing would produce sweeping improvement, especially for the neediest students. It didn’t. I couldn’t pretend otherwise. I came to realize that the privatization movement was a continuation of a decades-long campaign by right-wingers who hated public schools, which they derisively called “government schools.” I renounced my own past views and determined to expose the well-funded smear campaign against American public schools and their teachers.In 2013, watching the privatization movement grow to become the status quo, embedded in federal and state policy and supported by billionaires and major foundations, I published Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, which contained not only an indictment of privatization and teacher-bashing, but also a detailed list of research-based actions that would improve schools and help poor and needy students, their families, and their communities.What I had come to understand was that the root cause of poor performance in school is not “bad schools” or “bad teachers” but poverty. Closing schools and firing their teachers and principals does not help students. If anything, it introduces damaging instability into their lives. The privatizers hail disruption and call it “creative,” but it is neither creative nor beneficial.The Corporate Disrupters are indifferent to poverty and racial segregation. They refuse to acknowledge the impact of poverty on students’ lives. They insist that poverty can be cured by “great teachers” or “great schools.” It is true that teachers can change children’s lives; time and again, remarkable and dedicated teachers have enabled students to emerge from difficult circumstances because of their influence. But uplifting individual stories are not proof of a large-scale remedy. There is neither research nor evidence to support the Disrupters’ belief that intergenerational, systemic poverty can be eliminated by teachers and schools. Lasting social change requires a new direction in public policy, one that directly reduces economic inequality and poverty.Disrupters wreak havoc on urban school districts, where test scores are lowest and where poverty and racial segregation are concentrated. In some cities, such as New Orleans, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., the very existence of public education has been put at risk by the growth of charter schools. Others, like Oakland, teeter on the brink of insolvency due to the diversion of state funds to charter schools. The privatizers gloss over two fundamental facts: first, every dollar that goes to a charter school is taken away from public schools; second, public schools have fixed costs that cannot be reduced, requiring them to lay off teachers, increase class sizes, and cut programs. Thus, the great majority of students suffer from budget cuts so that a small minority of students can attend charter schools, which may abruptly close due to mismanagement or low enrollment.Because the Disruption movement was promoted by the Obama administration, supporters of public education were caught off guard. If Democrats, the traditional defenders of public education, gave their approval to the strategies of the Disruption movement, how bad could it be? President Obama’s secretary of education Arne Duncan frequently pointed to successful charter schools, but never acknowledged such factors as attrition rates, exclusion of students with disabilities or English learners, or the large number of charter schools that failed or that closed after a year or two.The remedies imposed by the Obama administration were no different from those of the George W. Bush administration. Actually, they were worse. None had any evidence to support them. None achieved the promised outcomes. When the Obama administration was followed by the Trump administration, the failed Bush-Obama policies remained in place. The Disruption agenda remained the same whether the secretary of education was Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings, Arne Duncan, John King, or Betsy DeVos.After two decades of the same failed federal policies, it became clear that the Disruption movement was running out of steam. Even the Disrupters felt the slow but steady shift of the pendulum away from the stale and unpopular policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. Since test scores were stagnant, some moved the goalposts and said that test scores didn’t really matter after all; instead, graduation rates mattered, or parental satisfaction mattered, or choice was an end in itself and nothing else mattered. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos claimed that as long as parents were choosing their children’s schools, the outcomes were unimportant. The sense of an era coming to an end was palpable.The Disruption movement is dying. It is not yet dead, but it is nonetheless on its last legs, stumbling and defensive. Its strategies of high-stakes testing, standardization, and privatization have not succeeded. Yet its adherents press on because the money keeps flowing in from billionaires and the federal government. The Disruption combine is like a giant creature whose heart and brain have died, but whose tentacles keep reaching out and strangling whatever it can get hold of.As I was writing this book, I read about a man who decapitated a rattlesnake in his backyard; he waited ten minutes, then picked up the detached head, and it bit him, nearly killing him. The snake was dead, but it still had poisonous venom and still was capable of grievous harm. That is like the Disrupters today. Not one of their efforts has succeeded, as I will show in this book. Based on glorious promises, Disruption has managed to undercut and damage public education in many urban districts by replacing public schools with ones that are privately managed. But taking control is not the same as being successful. Disruption has failed to achieve any of its goals. It is kept alive by its vast resources and by its lock on federal policy: every child must be tested every year, and test results are used to hold teachers, administrators, and schools accountable. States must intervene in the lowest-performing schools, either closing or privatizing them. Closing schools does not make them better nor does it help the students who are sent to distant schools. Read more Customers Review: Like all of Ravitch’s most recent books, this is extremely well-researched and well-argued. Most of the pushback against the book comes from would-be reformers who have not yet let go of their conviction that ‘accountability’ and scientific data will improve schooling, an institution based almost entirely on human relationships and communication. Perhaps Goliath isn’t dead yet–but he’s circling the drain.The book is lively and filled with stories, events, with quotes and perspectives from education’s best thinkers and writers, designed to convince, then inspire, the reader. A worthy addition to the current conversation about school reform, from the POV of those who are best positioned to see the need for, design and carry out reform.
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[PDF] Download Mamie on the Mound: A Woman in Baseball's Negro Leagues by Leah Henderson | Free EBOOK PDF English
 | Book Details Title: Mamie on the Mound: A Woman in Baseball’s Negro Leagues |
Book DescriptionAbout the Author Leah Henderson was one of only two girls on a highly competitive “all-boys” traveling soccer team when she was young, so Mamie’s desire to play ball echoed her own. Leah writes for young readers of all ages, and her books include Children’s Africana Book Awards notable and Bank Street Best Books of 2017, One Shadow on the Wall. She is a mentor, and avid traveler, and her volunteer work has roots in West Africa. Leah holds an MFA in Writing and is on faculty in Spalding University’s MFA program. When she is not traveling or off playing soccer with her dog at midnight, you can find her at home in Washington, D.C.George Doutsiopoulos graduated from the School of Economics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece in 2005, but he decided to pursue a career in illustration, his true passion. In 2006, he won a prestigious comic competition and received a three-year, full scholarship to AKTO Applied Arts College in Athens, Greece. He has created illustrations for publishing houses like Scholastic and Heinemann, gaming companies, and other companies in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He specializes in illustrations for books, children’s books, board games, online games and advertising. In addition, George teaches drawing, sketching and illustration to both children and adults Read more Customers Review: Inspiring story and vibrant art on a little-known (to me) subject! Young readers will love learning about Mamie Johnson’s persistence and confidence in a time when, as Henderson states, she had two big strikes against her. An engaging biography that’s sure to spark thoughtful conversations on race, gender, class, and equality. In pitching terms, a shutout. | |
[PDF] Download Search and Find A Number of Numbers: 1 book, 100s of things to find! by Allan Sanders | Free EBOOK PDF English
 | Book Details Title: Search and Find A Number of Numbers: 1 book, 100s of things to find! |
Book DescriptionReview “Overall an engaging entry in the seek-and-find genre” – Kirkus Reviews Read more About the Author AMANDA WOOD began her career in illustration at the Natural History Museum, London, and went on to be the founding Editor and Publisher of Templar for more than 30 years. In her time there, she published and nurtured numerous Greenaway winners, and edited and wrote groundbreaking series such as The Ologies, which have sold over 19 million-copies worldwide. Today she writes and runs her own small press from her home in Surrey. Read more Customers Review: Love the graphics of this book and the other one “Alphabet of Alphabets “. They have the same look and feel to them with interesting pages that our 2 year old really enjoys. We started with the alphabet book at 18 months and knew we needed this one once it was released in January 2020. The pages are thicker so they hold up to little eager hands turning the pages. Highly recommend both books to read with your little ones (I even enjoy looking at the pictures)
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