Dr. Joseph Bishop (Education, Policy, Leadership, Organizations, Ph.D., ’08) has edited the forthcoming book, Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America (Teachers College Press, 2022).
In Our Children Can’t Wait, Dr. Bishop and others describe how education policies in the United States have too long and too often ignored circumstances outside of school that impact educational opportunity for young people, particularly students of color. A newsletter from UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools (CTS) explains, “COVID-19 has made it impossible to overlook the needs of the whole child, both inside and outside of school.” Our Children Can’t Wait offers a timely account of addressing housing, public health, neighborhood conditions, and segregation into educational policy and practice “essential to improving academic outcomes and student health.” Beyond identifying problems, its authors draw an “equity roadmap” for how education policy can address ongoing gaps in education opportunity.
“Our Children Can’t Wait should serve as a wake-up call to policymakers, philanthropists, and others who support education and have worked to bring about its improvement,” writes Pedro A. Noguera, Dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education. “For too long, we have relied on policies that narrowly focus on raising student achievement. Meanwhile, the factors that affect the health and well-being of children have often been ignored. This book provides evidence from a variety of fields to show us why a broader, bolder, and more comprehensive approach to child development and school improvement is needed. With chapters written by a collection of scholars from a variety of disciplines, this book provides the blueprint for creating new policies at the local, state, and federal levels that can really make a difference for our children.”
Dr. Joseph Bishop is the Executive Director and cofounder of the Center for the Transformation of Schools (CTS) in the School of Education and Information Studies and UCLA. CTS is a research center that informs school systems and policymakers in addressing the “needs, interests, and talents of young people in a number of areas including school discipline and school climate, juvenile justice reform, student homelessness, students in the foster care system, school finance,” especially the holistic needs of students of color. Previous to his work with CTS, Dr. Bishop held various educational leadership positions in government and professional organizations. He has contributed to NPR, the LA Times, and The Washington Post.