Continuation of AFST 492

Continuation of AFST 492

Continuation of AFST 492

The course examines the reforms catalyzed by the federal "Race to the Top" competitive grant program and by waivers from No Child Left Behind issued by the federal Department of Education; and explores how these reforms resemble and differ from those mandated by NCLB. Charters, vouchers and competition are discussed along with school governance and funding. Micro as well as macro policy perspectives are provided through the instructor's ongoing work helping Houston's Aldine Independent School District (the 2009 Broad Prize winner with 64,000 low-income and minority students) design and pilot a new teacher evaluation system, a new compensation system, a "peer assistance and and review" process for professional development, remediation and dismissal along with related reforms.

This course uses the history of black displacement to examine community power and advocacy. It examines the methods of advocacy (e.g. case, class, and legislative) and political action through which community activists can influence social policy development and community and institutional change. The course also analyzes selected strategies and tactics of change and seeks to develop alternative roles in the group advocacy, lobbying, public education and public relations, electoral politics, coalition building, and legal and ethical dilemmas in political action. Case studies of neighborhood displacement serve as central means of examing course topics.

This seminar analyzes the connection between race, crime, punishment, and politics in the United States. The primary focus is on the role of race in explaining why the country's prision population exploded since the early 1970s and why the United States today has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Topics to be covered include: the early history of race in the development of the criminal justice system, including an examination of lynchings and the convict-leasing system; the relationship between the crime rate, patterns of offending and arrests, and the incarceration rate; public opinion and "law-and-order" politics; U.S. penal policies compared with other industrialized countries; capital punishment; the growth of the prision-industrial complex; the "war on drugs"; the courts, prisioners' rights, and political prisoners; felon disenfranchisement, elections, and democracy; and the future of penal reform. The class will take field trips to a maximum-security jail in Philadelphia and to a state prision in the Philadelphia suburbs. This seminar is intended for both advanced undergraduates and graduate students.