Education Reform

In Testing Education, Kathy Greeley recounts the impact of education reform from a teacher's point of view. Based on a teaching career ranging nearly forty years, Greeley details how schools went from learning communities infused with excitement, intellectual stimulation, and joy to sterile spaces of stress, intimidation, and fear. In this ultimately hopeful memoir, Greeley asks us to learn from the past to reimagine the future of public education.

In a polarizing and racially divided America, what do children of color learn about themselves before they even go to school? How do they see themselves and is that image only exacerbated by spending twelve years in a public education system that perpetuates negative stereotypes? Brian Rashad Fuller personally knows that the impact of low expectations can be devastating. He aims to make a difference in this humanizing and very personal portrayal of what it means to be Black in America's schools.

In How to Educate a Citizen, E.D. Hirsch continues the conversation he began 30 years ago with his classic best seller Cultural Literacy, urging America’s public schools, particularly at the elementary level, to educate our children more effectively to help heal and preserve the nation. Since the 1960s, our schools have been relying on “child-centered learning”. History, geography, science, civics, and other essential knowledge have been dumbed down by vacuous learning “techniques” and “values-based” curricula.

Efforts to address inequities within our schools tend to ignore the underlying beliefs that sustain injustices, and focus instead on short-lived policies and practices. This book takes a different approach to eradicating educational disparities. Drawing on more than 40 interviews with teachers, principals, and district leaders, Manya C. Whitaker offers educators guidance for leading a school or district grounded in social justice that centers teachers - not just teaching practices - and that focuses on the belief systems that shape decision-making.

Over the past decade, educational instruction has become increasingly digitized as districts rush to dole out laptops and iPads to every student. Yet the most important question, “Is this what is best for students?” is glossed over. Veteran teachers Joe Clement and Matt Miles have seen firsthand how damaging technology overuse and misuse has been to our kids. On a mission to educate and empower parents, they show how screen saturation at home and school has created a wide range of cognitive and social deficits in our young people.

Naming names, along with grades and test scores, Golden lays bare a corrupt system in which middle-class and working-class whites and Asian Ameri­cans are routinely passed over in favor of wealthy white students with lesser credentials - children of alumni, big donors, and celebrities. The Price of Admission is a must-listen - for parents and students with a personal stake in college admissions but also for those disturbed by the growing divide between ordinary and privileged Americans.

Jonathan Kozol traveled from the most blighted neighborhoods of Chicago to the urban wreckage of Camden, New Jersey; from the ghetto suburbs of Detroit to inner-city San Antonio; East St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Everywhere, he discovered separate systems of public schools, with the children of America's poor condemned to schools that are underfunded, understaffed, physically crumbling, and imbued with despair.

From two leading experts in education and entrepreneurship, an urgent call for the radical reimagining of American education so that we better equip students for the realities of the 21st-century economy.

Students of all backgrounds reach their full potential when they feel a sense of belonging and inclusion. When their social identities are valued as assets rather than barriers to learning, they flourish. This guide provides evidence-based strategies that support you as a leader in creating an environment that promotes identity-safe students, who experience a challenging curriculum that respects their diverse social identities.

Best-selling author Mike Schmoker describes a plan for radically improving student learning that is built on three core elements: a focused and coherent curriculum (what we teach); clear, prioritized lessons (how we teach); and purposeful reading and writing, or authentic literacy. With this "less is more" philosophy, educators can help students learn content at a deeper level, develop greater critical thinking skills, and discover more clearly how content-area concepts affect their lives and the world around them.

Most Americans today see school choice as their inalienable right. In The Choice We Face, scholar Jon Hale reveals what most fail to see: school choice is grounded in a complex history of race, exclusion, and inequality. Through evaluating historic and contemporary education policies, Hale demonstrates how reframing the way we see school choice represents an opportunity to evolve from complicity to action.

In his book, Peter Hitchens describes the misjudgements made by politicians over the years that have led to the increase of class distinction and privilege in our education system. This is of course the opposite of what was intended, especially by former Minister of Education Shirley Williams and Margaret Thatcher, her successor in that role, who closed down many more Grammar Schools than Williams.

Why is it so hard to get students to pay attention? Conventional wisdom blames iPhones, insisting that access to technology has ruined students' ability to focus. The logical response is to ban electronics in class. But acclaimed educator James M. Lang argues that this solution obscures a deeper problem: how we teach is often at odds with how students learn. Classrooms are designed to force students into long periods of intense focus, but emerging science reveals that the brain is wired for distraction. We learn best when able to actively seek and synthesize new information.

I went into teaching to change the world. Instead, my students changed me. These are some of my stories. I tell them at a time when education's gone from being a noble pursuit to the epicenter of a national storm. Good teachers are leaving the field at staggering rates. Politicians and pundits are out in full force. Everyone has something to say about education - everyone except the students and teachers in the classroom.

In The Homework Myth, nationally known educator and parenting expert Alfie Kohn systematically examines the usual defenses of homework - that it promotes higher achievement, "reinforces" learning, and teaches study skills and responsibility. None of these assumptions, he shows, actually passes the test of research, logic, or experience.

This book tells the story of one man's life journey into the heart of the struggle to reform the nation's schools. Fuller has always believed that it is important for poor and working class Black people to gain access to the levers of power dictating their lives. He believes that those of us who are educated and resourceful have a moral and historical responsibility to help them, and that is what he has always tried to do. Early in his life he found truth in the words of the great Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will."

This unique essay in verse is a learning tool for educators who want to reconsider their cultural pedagogy. Using the author’s own experiences with a lack of diversity in the education system in Cape Breton as a framing narrative, the piece calls into question how educators respond to students from diverse backgrounds.

Good behavior is a skill that can be taught and developed through practice. It just requires a shift in our perspective. If you have tried behavior folders, clip systems, or other interventions based on punishments and rewards, you've probably discovered these one-size-fits all approaches to behavior management all too often prove to be ineffective with the very students they were designed to help.

In The Power of a Plant, globally acclaimed teacher and self-proclaimed CEO (Chief Eternal Optimist) Stephen Ritz shows you how, in one of the nation's poorest communities, his students thrive in school and in life by growing, cooking, eating, and sharing the bounty of their green classroom.

Schools have long meant more than an education in America. Flawed, inequitable, underfunded, and segregated, they remain the most important engine of social mobility and the crucible of our democracy. The cost of closing them for so long during COVID, made with good intentions, has not been fully reckoned with. In The Stolen Year, Anya Kamenetz follows families across the country through the pandemic. She dives deep into the history that brought us to this point, making the case that 2020 wasn't a lost year—it was taken from our children by years of neglect and bad faith.