Her early articles on social reproduction, social class and the hidden curriculum and her now classic 1997 book, Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform, were groundbreaking and changed the way a generation of educational scholars viewed the relationship between urban schools and communities.

These are among the most widely cited articles in education and among the first to animate the processes of social reproduction through empirical work in the United States.

Additionally, Anyon offers critical analysis of federal, state and local policies, which much educational research fails to fully acknowledge, explicate or interrogate.

Radical Possibilities also takes on the task of exploring how we might build a new broad-based, multiracial social movement with education at the center.

Here, Anyon reflects on her own personal journey through and with theory, from her early engagement with Marx to more recent encounters with theorists as diverse as Judith Butler, Arjun Appadurai and Chantal Mouffe.

The volume then features the work of her students who reflect on their own uses of theory and extend Anyon's analyses into a broad range of research areas.

We need a new paradigm, Anyon insists, "one that promotes equity-seeking school change and that includes strategies to create conditions that will allow the educational improvements to take root, grow, and bear fruit in students' lives.

Anyon continued to work with doctoral students until the time of her death on September 7, 2013, at her home in Manhattan, where she died of cancer.