This comprehensive anthology features classical readings on the Sociology of Education, as well as current, original essays by notable contemporary scholars. Assigned as a main text or a supplement, this fully updated uses the open systems approach to provide readers with a framework for understanding and analyzing the book's range of topics. Jeanne H. Ballantine, Joan Z. Spade, and new co-editor Jenny M. Stuber, all experienced instructors in this subject, have chosen articles that are highly readable, and that represent the field's major theoretical perspectives, methods, and issues. The includes twenty new selections and five revisions of original readings and features new perspectives on some of the most contested issues in the field today, such as school funding, gender issues in schools, parent and neighborhood influences on learning, growing inequality in schools, and charter schools.