Kenneth Teitelbaum is a former education dean at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, University of North Carolina Wilmington, and Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He was also a department chair at Kent State University and a faculty member and graduate program coordinator at Binghamton University and Syracuse University. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the linkage of different educational ideas, policies, and practices to a commitment for democratic schooling. Teitelbaum's approach is to integrate the current and the historical, the practical and the theoretical, the technical and the socio-political, and the personal and the structural.

1: Teaching Has Its Own Rewards; 2: Despite What Some Think, Teaching Isn't Easy; 3: Reasons to be A Teacher; 4: "Work with What You've Got"; 5: Lessons from Alternative (Progressive) Schooling; 6: Understanding Teacher Education and Teaching; 7: Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Teacher Education; 8: The Work of Education Deans Amidst Recent State Policy Changes; 9: The Nature and Value of Curriculum Theorizing; 10: Curriculum Debates; 11: Critical Civic Literacy in Schools; 12: Curriculum and Socialism in the United States, 1900-1920; 13: Everyone a Writer; 14: What About the Arts?; 15: The Value of Recreation and Play; 16: Multicultural Education: A Rationale; 17: Tensions and Dilemmas in Multicultural Teaching; 18: Context and Black Academic Attainment; 19: Poverty, Children, and Schooling; 20: Class in America: What do Schools Have to do With It?; 21: The "Gaze" of Teachers and Issues of Academic and Communicative Competence;