What would it take to make Earth a child safe zone? Nineteen Clues: Great Transformations Can be Achieved through Collective Action makes the case that there are two threats to our children that impact every aspect of their present and future lives. The first threat to our children is the hostile take over the US public education system. Noam Chomsky calls it, “the campaign to destroy those parts of the education system that enrich the lives of students, that interfere with indoctrination, with control, with imposing passivity and obedience.” While Diane Ravitch writes, “Never have public schools been as subject to upheaval, assault, and chaos as they are today.” Across America parents and teachers are organizing in response to this dangerous threat to children, to democracy, and to the future of US society. Nineteen Clues traces the emergence of a powerful and dynamic children’s civil rights movement, including the establishment of organizations such as United Opt-Out, BadAss Teachers, and Save Our Schools. The second threat to our children is the great acceleration in the changes taking place to the planet. “Humanity is standing at a moment in history when a Great Transformation is needed to respond to the immense threat to the Earth,” a group of Nobel Laureates writes in their summary of the 2007 Potsdam Memorandum on Global Sustainability. “We live on a human-dominated planet, putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on Earth,” Johan Rockström said in his 2010 presentation. “The planetary risks we're facing are so large, that business as usual is not an option. In fact, we’re in a phase where transformative change is necessary, which opens the window for innovation, for new ideas and new paradigms.”“Society is taking substantial risks by delaying urgent and large-scale action,” Lidia Brito and Mark Stafford Smith write in The State of the Planet Declaration, which was the consensus of more than 3,000 scientists at the 2012 Planet Under Pressure Conference. “We must show leadership at all levels. We must all play our parts. We urge the world to grasp this moment and make history.”Garn Press was founded so we can play our part, and Nineteen Clues takes up this challenge. It makes the case that what is good for our children is good for the planet, and that these are not separate struggles. The arguments presented in Nineteen Clues have been many years in the making, presented at national and international conferences, and critiqued in peer-review. Nineteen Clues unites the struggles of scientists, teachers and parents. It salutes their tenacity and grit, as well as the brilliance of their arguments and their endurance. It is written in the belief that this is a moment in history when we must unite in the struggle to make Earth a child safe zone, knowing that people can succeed when governments fail.

Nineteen Clues: Great Transformations Can Be Achieved Through Collective Action

Science & Math

Taylor, Denny

Earth Sciences

Garn Press

Can a teacher challenge the wealthiest man in the world? This is the question Garn Press asked in 2014 when Anthony Cody’s The Educator And The Oligarch was first published. The answer is a resounding “Yes!”
Anthony Cody not only challenged Bill Gates, but also received the 2015 NCTE George Orwell Award, which recognizes writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse, and the 2015 eLIT Silver Medal Award in the education/ academic/ teaching category.
In recognition of the importance of Anthony’s steadfast resistance to Gates’ unacceptable manipulation of public education policies, Garn Press just published a new edition of The Educator And The Oligarch with a new preface by Anthony. The new edition is available in paperback and eBook formats, and for the first time, as a hardcover book.
Anthony Cody spent 24 years working in the high poverty schools of Oakland, California, and since that time he has been a tireless advocate for teachers and children in U.S. Public Schools. Bill Gates, on the other hand, with no teaching credentials or public school experience, has arbitrarily made education reform one of the top domestic priorities for the Gates Foundation, and his philanthropic organization has poured billions of dollars into reshaping American schools. Gates’ money has paid for research, advocacy, and a whole non-profit industry aligned with his self-proclaimed agenda.
Based on indisputable scientific research evidence, in The Educator And The Oligarch, Anthony Cody makes the case that the chosen path of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation’s data-driven reform, centered on high stakes tests, educational technology and market-based competition between schools, threatens great harm to public education.
The Educator And The Oligarch is a book for parents and teachers and a must read indictment of big money public school reform for all politicians, policy makers, and public officials.

The Educator And The Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges The Gates Foundation

Politics & Social Sciences

Cody, Anthony

Social Sciences

“She died within seconds of falling,” Rosie’s Umbrella begins in 1955. “She could see the shadows that went with the echoes of screams from up above, but the patterns of light and the fading sounds were nothing more than that. There was not time to think about them, to name them or to say, ‘There’s lovely’, but that is how she felt in those last moments of her life as she fell down the old mine shaft.” Living a life of privilege in Boston in 1995, Rosie Llewelyn knows nothing about Wales or coal mining or about the child who fell down an old mine shaft. She should, because the death of the child, so many years ago, will change her life forever. Driven by her unconditional love for her aunt who suddenly falls apart, Rosie is determined to find out about her family, and in a life and death struggle that fuses past and present she discovers her own truth in a heroic journey of self-discovery.

Rosie's Umbrella

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

What’s Whole in Whole Language in the 21st Century? includes a new introduction by Ken Goodman, commentary by Michael Rosen, and excerpts from a series of never published interviews conducted in 1992-1993 by Denny Taylor of renowned reading scholars who knew Ken and Yetta Goodman, and who spoke freely about their lives together as well as their research and teaching.The insights of these scholars, who include Frank Smith and Jeanne Chall, are profound. They shift the political discourse of reading research and teaching young children to read. Ousting the propaganda, they shed light on what really happened to progressive educators and whole language teachers at the end of the 20th century.The original version of Goodman’s best-selling book sold two hundred and fifty thousand copies, became a worldwide phenomenon, and was translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese. It became the handbook for the revolution for equality and justice for all children that occurred in classrooms around the world. Teachers were inspired to put aside commercial materials that were based on very limited understandings of reading and writing, and instead placed children and their very natural curiosity about language and learning at the center of classroom activity.In the 1990’s, the agenda for public education shifted away from developmentally appropriate teaching and learning and prominently featured the goals of curriculum standardization, test-based accountability, and a reward-and-punish policy toward school performance. Although conservative ideology and the thirst for profit were factors at play, the real motive was to ensure that U.S. corporations would remain competitive in the 21st century global market. They would achieve this by turning schools into “workforce development systems” that would produce future workers with very narrowly defined literacy proficiencies and a predilection for passivity and compliance. This is the experience of most public school children today, whose lives and academic development are so negatively impacted by the Common Core.There has never been a more critical time for teachers to read What’s Whole in Whole Language in the 21st Century? It is as prescient today as it was when Goodman first wrote it.

What's Whole in Whole Language in the 21st Century?

Reference

Goodman, Ken

Words, Language & Grammar

Rosie's Umbrella is about love and loss, forgetting and remembering, losing one's self and becoming someone you never knew or imagined being. We meet 14-year-old Rosie Llywelyn in Boston in 1995 at the moment her life is changed forever by a tragedy that occurred in a coalmining village in Wales in 1955. From the very first page the reader experiences the emotional turmoil Rosie feels as she tries to find out what has happened to her Aunt Sarah and why her parents won't tell her why they have had Sarah committed to a psychiatric unit in a nearby hospital. As Taylor engages the reader in Rosie's tragic family story of guilt and forgiveness, she falls into her own family history, and the reader falls with her - as she exposes the cruelty of governments, the wounds of being lumpen, the exploitation of poor families and children, and the trauma of the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of miners and their families from the Welsh coalmining valleys in the first half of the twentieth century. As Rosie struggles to find her own truth with the support of her teacher and friends in school, she realizes another family tragedy is about to happen. Falling faster now through the pages, Taylor makes sure readers stays on the page with Rosie and her friends through their political awakening to the devastation that power and privilege has on poor people, and to their own vision for the future. Until, filled with love, laughter, and the will to survive, they are ready for the struggle that they know lies ahead.

Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance was born out of blogging as an act of social justice. Over a period of about two years, many posts built the case against market-based education reform and for a critical re-imagining of public education. This book presents a coordinated series of essays based on that work, using a wide range of written and visual texts to call for the universal public education we have failed to achieve.The central image and warning of the book—“beware the roadbuilders”—is drawn from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The book presents a compelling argument that billionaires, politicians, and self-professed education reformers are doing more harm than good—despite their public messages. The public and our students are being crushed beneath their reforms.In the wake of Ferguson and the growing list of sacrificed young black men—Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner—the essays in this book gain an even wider resonance, seeking to examine both the larger world of inequity as well as the continued failure of educational inequity. While each chapter stands as a separate reading, the book as a whole produces a cohesive theme and argument about the power of critical literacy to read and re-read the world, and to write and re-rewrite the world (Paulo Freire).Supporting that larger message are several key ideas and questions: What are the confrontational texts we should be inviting students to read, that anyone should read? Instead of reducing texts to the narrow expectations of New Criticism or “close reading,” how do we expand those texts into how they inform living in a free society and engaging in activism? How do traditional assumptions about what texts matter and what texts reveal support the status quo of power? And how can texts of all types assist in the ongoing pursuit of equity among free people?

Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance

Thomas, P. L.

History & Criticism

The future is often foretold in stories of the past. As families flee the Debaltseve in Eastern Ukraine in 2015, Ken Goodman’s The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale takes us back to families fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe at the turn of the Twentieth Century. It is a compelling story of Jewish migration to America, which begins in Smorgon, now in Belarus, a former Soviet Republic, but at the time Smorgon was in Vilnius, a district of Lithuania, and a part of the Russian Empire. The book is beautifully illustrated throughout with fine line drawings by Ray Martens.The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale begins in 1901 and ends in 1906 and is told to us by little Duvid Mendel Gutman, who was Ken Goodman’s father. The story is filled with conflict over the political changes taking place, as well as the love and generosity of the people Duvid encounters, including the gypsies and Jews who live in the woods with their dancing bears to protect them. With Duvid to guide us we participate with his family in Sukkos, Shabbos, Chanukah, Purim, Passover and the High Holidays. By his side we witness the strike for a 12 hour day on May Day 1904 and the Revolution in Smorgon in 1905, and we feel with him and his family the heart wrenching distress at what happened to members of his family who participated in the workers’ resistance movement to the social injustice they were forced to endure.“To understand who we are as Americans,” Ken Goodman writes, “we need to understand who we were and where we have been.”The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale does just that. It is a book to be read aloud at Chanukah and Passover, and at Yom Kippur, but also at other times by families of different religious and cultural traditions, who share with Duvid Mendel Gutman and his family an indomitable human spirit and hope for the future.

The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale

The Smart One: A Grandfather's Tale

Raising Peacemakers

Raising Peacemakers tells a twenty-two year story of kids growing up with peacemaking as their foundation. At Downtown Alternative School (DAS), a small public elementary school in Toronto, child-to-child conflicts were understood as opportunities. Children and adults worked hard to create a warm inclusive community where differing viewpoints and disagreements could be handled fairly and safely.
While the book includes documentation and transcripts, it’s a narrative rather than an academic text. It’s the author’s story and many stories. It’s a trail of re-thinking, negotiating and re-negotiating, solving and re-solving (occasionally resolving) teaching and learning dilemmas. It’s a tale of one school’s brave and optimistic effort to create and sustain healthy, safe, equitable, and academically relevant conditions for and with people whose lives were and are at stake in public education. It’s about children and adults growing together as they discover more about what it means (and what it takes) to become responsible citizens who care about each other, about their community, and about the world.
Between their many inevitable conflicts, encouraged by adults, DAS children established their own rituals. They would double-cross their arms and clasp fingers in a group handshake to mark the conclusion of “a peacemaking.” They would wipe away tears, giggle, move on to other things, or resume their play. They were learning to express themselves, listen, and include. The adults learned to hold back, hover, and accept what for the children constituted resolution, even when they (the adults) did not always fully get it.
The DAS community was dedicated to the serious work, and to the joy, of respectful relationships and power sharing. This book invites you to step back more than twenty years to learn about how this began and what keeps it alive to this day.

Parenting & Relationships

Fine, Esther Sokolov

Raising Peacemakers tells a twenty-two year story of kids growing up with peacemaking as their foundation. At Downtown Alternative School (DAS), a small public elementary school in Toronto, child-to-child conflicts were understood as opportunities. Children and adults worked hard to create a warm inclusive community where differing viewpoints and disagreements could be handled fairly and safely.While the book includes documentation and transcripts, it's a narrative rather than an academic text. It's the author's story and many stories. It's a trail of re-thinking, negotiating and re-negotiating, solving and re-solving (occasionally resolving) teaching and learning dilemmas. It's a tale of one school's brave and optimistic effort to create and sustain healthy, safe, equitable, and academically relevant conditions for and with people whose lives were and are at stake in public education. It's about children and adults growing together as they discover more about what it means (and what it takes) to become responsible citizens who care about each other, about their community, and about the world.Between their many inevitable conflicts, encouraged by adults, DAS children established their own rituals. They would double-cross their arms and clasp fingers in a group handshake to mark the conclusion of "a peacemaking." They would wipe away tears, giggle, move on to other things, or resume their play. They were learning to express themselves, listen, and include. The adults learned to hold back, hover, and accept what for the children constituted resolution, even when they (the adults) did not always fully get it.The DAS community was dedicated to the serious work, and to the joy, of respectful relationships and power sharing. This book invites you to step back more than twenty years to learn about how this began and what keeps it alive to this day.

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Garn Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Garn Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Garn Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Nineteen Clues: Great Transformations Can Be Achieved Through Collective Action

The Educator And The Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges The Gates Foundation

Rosie's Umbrella

What's Whole in Whole Language in the 21st Century?

Rosie's Umbrella

Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance

The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale

The Smart One: A Grandfather's Tale

Raising Peacemakers

Raising Peacemakers