Invisible Children in the Society and Its Schools

The authors in this book use the metaphors of invisibility and visibility to explore the social and school lives of many children and young people in North America whose complexity, strengths, and vulnerabilities are largely unseen in the society and its schools. These “invisible children” are socially devalued in the sense that alleviating the difficult conditions of their lives is not a priority—children who are subjected to derogatory stereotypes, who are educationally neglected in schools that respond inadequately if at all to their needs, and who receive relatively little attention from scholars in the field of education or writers in the popular press.

The chapter authors, some of the most passionate and insightful scholars in the field of education today, detail oversights and assaults, visible and invisible, but also affirm the capacity of many of these young people to survive, flourish, and often educate others, despite the painful and even desperate circumstances of their lives. By sharing their voices, providing basic information about them, and offering thoughtful analysis of their social situation, this volume combines education and advocacy in an accessible volume responsive to some of the most pressing issues of our time. Although their research methodologies differ, all of the contributors aim to get the facts straight and to set them in a meaningful context.

New in the Third Edition: Chapters retained from the previous edition have been thoroughly revised and updated, and five totally new chapters have been added on the topics of:
*young people pushed into the “school-to-prison” pipeline;
*the “environmental landscape” of two out-of-school Mexican migrant teens in the rural Midwest;
*the perceptions and practices, in and outside schools, that construct African American boys as school failures;
*negative portrayals of blackness in the context of understanding the “collateral damage of continued white privilege”; and
*working-class pregnant and parenting teens’ efforts to create positive identities for themselves.

Of interest to a broad range of researchers, students, and practitioners across the field of education, this compelling book is accessible to all readers. It is particularly appropriate as a text for courses that address the social context of education, cultural and political change, and public policy, including social foundations of education, sociology of education, multicultural education, curriculum studies, and educational policy.