NCEA Materials

Action for Better Schools

NCEA's newsletter, is published three or four times a year. Most issues focus on a single "hot" topic and include a resource list. Free to members; nonmembers, $1 each; bulk rates on request.

Recent Issues:

Zero Tolerance Makes Zero Sense (Spring 2001)

Examines the impact of zero tolerance disciplinary policies in schools, explores alternatives, and provides a list of practical resources.

The Big Issues: Achievement, Standards and Tests (Fall 2000)

Reports on debate about the value of standardized testing in improving schools and organizing efforts aimed at improving learning. Profiles of parent and community organizing efforts. Report on 2000 conference: Breaking Barriers: Working Together for Justice in Schools.

Report on NCEA Activities (Spring 2000)

Reports on Rethinking the Teaching of Slavery and other workshops and an overview of NCEA's work in 1998 and 1999.

Other Back Issues Available

Topics include: lessons from grassroots parent activists, school funding, social justice unionism, the DC schools crisis, filling the need for more teachers of colors, approaches to school violence, and more. Available from the NCEA office.

Other Resources

Background packet on tracking

Includes "What is Tracking?," action ideas; student, parent, and teacher views; "An Old Solution Creates New Problems," by Jeannie Oakes and Martin Lipton; sample resolutions, reading list, and more. $4.

Enid Lee, Communities and Schools in Crisis (51 page transcript). $4.

Luis Rodriguez, author of Always Running, 8/95 speech about schools and youth. $8 (audiotape); $3 (transcript).

School Violence in Context, NCEA report, 30 pages, 1995., includes Safe Schools Resource List. $3.

Defending Public Education, Political Research Associates, 1999, how to fight right-wing attacks on public education, $6.

School Colors: The Racial Politics of Public Education. Special issue of The Nation. $2.