Product Description
Biographies of famous Kansans that were important to the history of the state. ... Read more

Book Description
When you think of birds, you think of songbirds--bluebirds, robins, bluejays, chickadees-and that group of birds, the passerines, is featured in Volume II of Birds in Kansas.

Of the 424 bird species that have been recorded in Kansas, 208 are passerines, commonly known as songbirds or, more accurately, perching birds. (Many so-called songbirds, like crows, have terrible voices and can't sing a note, but all of them can "perch.") They include most of the birds you'll see at your feeder, and many you won't: flycatchers, larks, swallows, jays and crows, titmice, wrens, thrushes, waxwings, wood warblers, blackbirds, tanagers, finches, and others.

All 208 species found in Kansas are discussed in Birds in Kansas, Volume II. Abundantly illustrated with 199 photographs and 208 range maps, this handbook provides the only comprehensive, current, and authoritative treatment of the songbirds in the state.

Written specifically for amateur birdwatchers and naturalists, both volumes of Birds in Kansas provide the reader with common and scientific names, distribution maps, photographs, and facts concerning reported occurrence, breeding habits, habitats, field marks (for identification), and food preferences. Volume I, published in 1989, covers over 200 species of ducks and geese, gulls, herons, woodpeckers, shorebirds, birds of prey, and other non-passerines. Volume II is devoted solely to the passerines. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent information
These are very good books for those who are looking for information on birds in Kansas.Each species has a page or more and includes a map that shows which counties the bird can be found in and which counties she nests in.The only thing keeping this from a 5-star rating is the black & white pictures. Recommended as it has every bird known to be in Kansas, unlike "Birds of Kansas: Field Guide" which is much smaller (pocket size) and has great pictures, but only 100 or so species. ... Read more

Book Description
With critical issues like desegregation and funding facing our schools, dissatisfaction with public education has reached a new high. Teachers decry inadequate resources while critics claim educators are more concerned with job security than effective teaching. Though urban education has reached crisis proportions, contending players have difficulty agreeing on a common program of action. This book tells why.

Changing Urban Education confronts the prevailing naivete in school reform by examining the factors that shape, reinforce, or undermine reform efforts. Edited by one of the nation's leading urban scholars, it examines forces for change and resistance in urban education and proposes that the barrier to reform can only be overcome by understanding how schools fit into the broader political contexts of their cities.

Much of the problem with our schools lies with the reluctance of educators to recognize the profoundly political character of public education. The contributors show how urban political contexts vary widely with factors like racial composition, the role of the teachers' union, and relations between cities and surrounding metropolitan areas. Presenting case studies of original field research in Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, and six other urban areas, they consider how resistance to desegregation and the concentration of the poor in central urban areas affect education, and they suggest how cities can build support for reform through the involvement of business and other community players.

By demonstrating the complex interrelationship between urban education and politics, this book shows schools to be not just places for educating children, but also major employers and large spenders of tax dollars. It also introduces the concept of civic capacity--the ability of educators and noneducators to work together on common goals--and suggests that this key issue must be addressed before education can be improved.

Changing Urban Education makes it clear to educators that the outcome of reform efforts depends heavily on their political context as it reminds political scientists that education is a major part of the urban mix. While its prognosis is not entirely optimistic, it sets forth important guidelines that cannot be ignored if our schools are to successfully prepare children for the future.

This book is part of the Studies in Government and Public Policy series. ... Read more

Book Description
Drug and alcohol education in public schools may be important, but its authoritarian stance often invites skepticism among teachers and students alike. Yet this program has its roots not in modern bureaucracy or even Prohibition but in a social movement that flourished over a century ago.

Scientific Temperance Instruction was the most successful grassroots education program in American history, championed by an army of housewives in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union under the leadership of Mary Hanchett Hunt. As Hunt and her forces took their message across the country, they were opposed by many educators and other professionals who believed that ordinary citizens had no business interfering with educational matters. STI sparked heated conflict between expert and popular authority in the debate over alcohol education, but it was eventually mandated as part of public school curricula in all states.

The real issue surrounding STI, argues Jonathan Zimmerman, was not alcohol but the struggle to reconcile democracy and expertise. In this first book-length study of the crusade for STI, he shows Mary Hunt to be a wily and manipulative politician as he examines how citizens and experts used knowledge selectively to advance their own agendas. His work offers a microcosm for observing Progressive Era tensions between democracy and professionalism, localism and centralization, and social conservatism and liberalism.

Distilling Democracy points up a crucial and ongoing dilemma in our education system: educational directives handed down by experts deny citizens the right to transmit their values to their children, while populist educational values sometimes stifle classroom debate. By using history to demonstrate the public's participation in shaping public education, Zimmerman suggests that however unappealing the program, society needs to embrace such popular movements in order to uphold true democracy. His book offers fresh insight into an overlooked chapter in our history and will spark debate by raising new questions about lay influence on school curricula in modern America. ... Read more

Book Description
In an era when most colleges and universities have become vocational schools, their improvement measured in terms of cost reduction or instructional efficiency, the essential values of higher education are too often overlooked. Students are being filled with knowledge, but are not learning how to use it wisely, nor even understanding that it's important to do so.

According to philosopher and educator George Allan, what is most important about a college education is not what students are taught but whether they learn the moral practices that determine how they may best conduct their lives and how they can become responsible individuals--practices that cannot be taught but can only be learned in an environment that encourages imaginative play and open-ended dialogue. The most important thing colleges can offer young people, claims Allan, is a place to converse: to learn the skills of cultured intercourse and not just a trade.

Allan argues that the current goal-orientation of America's colleges and universities has undermined the very nature of higher education. He shows that while colleges historically may have been based on a religious sense of mission or on the Enlightenment's commitment to rational inquiry, today's universities have become resource centers organized to serve the needs of a diverse customer base of students. In its commitment to giving students what they want, this model of higher education not only neglects the broadening and deepening of minds, it encourages students to recognize the validity of numerous points of view without ever learning to interact creatively with them.

Writing with the same inventive openness he encourages for our colleges, Allan explores the essential nature of education and seeks to refocus the debate concerning its future. Rethinking College Education engages readers in fundamental issues rarely broached by the current educational literature, and it challenges American colleges and universities to reconsider their priorities before they lose completely the spirit and style that have been the sources of their importance to the nation. ... Read more

Book Description
Defined less by geography than by demographic character, Block, Kansas, in many ways exemplifies the prevalent yet seldom-scrutinized ethnic, religion-based community of the rural midwest.

Physically small, the town sprang up around four corners formed by crossroads. Spiritually strong and cohesive, it became the educational and cultural center for generations of German-Lutheran families. Block provided a religious and cultural oasis--a welcome transition for German-Lutheran immigrants faced with a new language and unfamiliar customs. Yet the tight bond between an ethnic society and a religion that shunned Americanism and the English language paradoxically slowed the transition and maintained a culturally isolated community well into the twentieth century.

In Life at Four Corners, Carol Coburn analyzes the powerful combination of those ethnic and religious institutions that effectively resisted assimilation for nearly 80 years only to succumb to the influences of the outside world during the 1930s and 1940s. Emphasizing the formal and informal education provided by the church, school, and family, she examines the total process of how values, identities, and all aspects of culture were transmitted from generation to generation.

"Few ethnic or community studies have focused on a 'village' community that defined itself less by geographic boundaries and more by ethnic and religious identity," writes Coburn. "The community's strong religious and ethnic identity, coupled with its homogeneity and rural isolation, provided a unique educational environment that was total, ongoing, and more pervasive than in most rural settings or ethnic urban environments." ... Read more

Book Description

The inspiring story of a CEO who gave up his career and followed his heart

Thomas M. Bloch (Kansas City, MO), former CEO of H&R Block, is an eighth grade math teacher and cofounder of University Academy. Bloch has been involved in a variety of other education initiatives in his hometown since he changed careers. He and his wife, Mary, founded the Youth Service Alliance of Greater Kansas City to encourage and recognize outstanding community service through school-based programs. He is a trustee of the University of Missouri at Kansas City and President of the Endowment Fund for the Henry W. Bloch School of Business. In 2000, he was asked to return to H&R Block as a member of the board of directors. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Educate yourself about the religious right with this book
Washington College Assistant Professor Melissa M. Deckman delivers readers a fresh new portrait of the Christian right which, although still critical of their ultimate end goals, wants to understand how they were able to achieve their successes or not.

Differing from the organizational research reports and partisan titles which already flood the market, Deckman's book has readers instead consider why the religious right enjoys so much electoral success even if a majority of American voters do not formally appear to support their ideas.

She then wants us to consider how waging a campaign/counter campaign against these candidates and public officials is literally impossible when we actually do not know about the people who we want to run against.

The thesis of Deckman's book is that both sides in a community demonize each other in the process of school board and local elections in an attempt to win support from undecided voters. The Christian right is at once both more similar and more complex than previous attack campaigns/counter-responses publicly have conceded. Articulating this complex nature will then enable myself and others to win more campaigns and more effectively sell our own policies to that swing public.

Starting out with wanting to make major change, the Christian right candidates and/or elected officials subsequently are required to alter their grand world views in order to be a part of the system which they ultimately seek to change. Built on compromise, the American political system is subsequently not receptive to radical changes which these people (and other candidates) would like to make. Our campaign portrayals of these people might therefore indicate what they would like to do, but it does not actually acknowledge what they are permitted to do; held in check by the American government's system of checks and balances.

Deckman's data includes case studies of elections held in Fairfax County Virginia and Garret County Maryland. These case studies prove that although they share some important group characteristics and goals, not all Christian right campaigns and then the candidates who run them are virtual `carbon copies' of each other. A vulnerability to internal dissent among various religious right candidates and office holders further lessens their being the `mighty boogeyman' of political jargon.

She also suggests that both the `far right' candidates and my beloved liberal counterparts are much more alike than we actually are different. The research in this book uncovers that non-religious right school board candidates are also likely to be religiously affiliated and also are more likely to come from the community elite---who can afford to run in an election and hold public office. We have more in common with each other than we have previously thought and/or let on in campaigns and debates.

Although I also read the more conventional broadsides against the right, and tend to agree with the left, Deckman's book is a critical step for defeating Christian right candidates.

Examines ongoing local school board elections in America
Also available in a hardcover edition (1589010000, $39.95), School Board Battles: The Christian Right In Local Politics by Melisa M. Deckman (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Washington College, Chesterton, Maryland) examines ongoing local school board elections in America, and their effect upon shaping the culture and educational curriculum of the nation, a phenomenon that gaind widespread attention when the Kansas state school board, led by outspoken Christians, voted to delete evolution from the state's science curriculum and standardized tests. Especially focusing upon the electoral success of Christian Right school board candidates, School Board Battles strives to reveal why conservative Christians run for school boards, the extent of the Christian Right's influence upon school boards, and the manner in which conservative Christians in general tend to govern. A critical and insightful study of turbulent struggles to determine what will be taught to America's next generation.

... Read more