Badges and incidents: a transdisciplinary history of the right to education in America

In Badges and Incidents, Michael J. Kaufman undertakes an interdisciplinary investigation of American education law and pedagogy. By weaving together the invaluable insights of law, education, history, political science, economics, psychology, and neuroscience, this book illuminates the ways in which the design of the American educational system does not reflect how human beings live and learn. It examines the principles of the nation's Founders and demonstrates how a distorted presentation of the Founders' views curtailed the development of a truly democratic educational system. The influence of this distortion on several critical Supreme Court decisions is exposed, and these decisions have largely failed to facilitate the educational system the Founders envisioned. By placing contemporary challenges in context and endorsing social constructivist pedagogy as the best path forward, Kaufman's study will prove invaluable to advocates of equity in education, helping them navigate a contentious political climate with an eye toward future reform efforts.

In Badges and Incidents, Michael J. Kaufman undertakes an interdisciplinary investigation of American education law and pedagogy. By weaving together the invaluable insights of law, education, history, political science, economics, psychology, and neuroscience, this book illuminates the ways in which the design of the American educational system does not reflect how human beings live and learn. It examines the principles of the nation's Founders and demonstrates how a distorted presentation of the Founders' views curtailed the development of a truly democratic educational system. The influence of this distortion on several critical Supreme Court decisions is exposed, and these decisions have largely failed to facilitate the educational system the Founders envisioned. By placing contemporary challenges in context and endorsing social constructivist pedagogy as the best path forward, Kaufman's study will prove invaluable to advocates of equity in education, helping them navigate a contentious political climate with an eye toward future reform efforts

"The book will show that the American educational system sustains its inequities in part by projecting a misleading view of human learning and development. I will trace the evolution of the American educational system to the principles of behaviorist educational psychology which presume that human beings learn through operant conditioning. This presumption then leads to an educational system based on individual and systemic rewards and punishments, which ultimately serves to justify an inequitably funded and segregated regime. Specifically, the book demonstrates how the checkered history of the right to education in America has been legitimated by this flawed presumption. As this book will show, pathbreaking new research from the disciplines of neuroscience and educational psychology have belied the flawed behaviorist foundations that have long undergirded the legal structures supporting the American educational regime. The book will demonstrate that human beings actually learn by constructing knowledge together through meaningful relationships I will carefully analyze that research, which reveals that all learning is constructed socially through meaningful relationships. This book will also show that if the American educational system were founded on the correct understanding that all knowledge is socially constructed through meaningful relationships, it would recognize a civil right to adequate and equitable educational resources, it would fulfill the Founders' vision of a regime in which knowledge is diffused through important associations, it would develop diverse, inclusive, and equitable pedagogies and practices,"--