Education Reform

Witnessing Whiteness invites listeners to consider what it means to be white, describes and critiques strategies used to avoid race issues, and identifies the detrimental effect of avoiding race on cross-race collaborations. The author illustrates how racial discomfort leads white people toward poor relationships with people of color.

From one of the largest organizations of public school principals, this book exposes many misguided school-reform initiatives that are negatively impacting students and educators across the country, and recommends ways to make them more effective. Veteran educator Gerald Tirozzi addresses all the hottest school reform trends including: charter schools, teacher merit pay, Race to the Top, Common Core State Standards, and more.

The Unteachables examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms.

With its practical advice and compassionate tone, The Myth of Laziness shows parents how to nurture their child's strengths and improve their classroom productivity. Most important, it shows how correcting these problems in childhood will help children live a fulfilling and productive adult life.

The New York Times–bestselling author of Rise of the Robots shows what happens as AI takes over our lives If you have a smartphone, you have AI in your pocket. AI is impossible to avoid online. And it has already changed everything from how doctors diagnose disease to how you...

In The Well-Educated Child, Dr. Deborah Kenny offers an inspiring vision for American education. Drawing on decades of experience in deeper learning practices that are now central to the national conversation, Kenny presents education as soul craft. To understand what a great education should look and feel like, Kenny takes us inside classrooms and describes the experience of students who are intrinsically motivated, challenged, gracious to one another, and inspired to learn.

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."

Named after Mahatma Gandhi's phrase for the schools of pre-colonial India, The Beautiful Tree recounts Tooley's journey from the largest shanty town in Africa to the hinterlands of Gansu, China. It introduces listeners to the families and teachers who taught him that the poor are not waiting for educational handouts. They are building their own schools and educating themselves.

As MacArthur award-winning educator Lisa Delpit reminds us - and as all research shows - there is no achievement gap at birth. In her long-awaited second book, Delpit presents a striking picture of the elements of contemporary public education that conspire against the prospects for poor children of color, creating a persistent gap in achievement during the school years that has eluded several decades of reform. Delpit reflects on two decades of reform efforts that have still left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement isn't for them.

In The Great Upheaval, Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt examine higher and postsecondary education to see how it has changed to become what it is today—and how it might be refitted for an uncertain future. Taking a unique historical, cross-industry perspective, Levine and Van Pelt perform a 360-degree survey of American higher education. The book looks objectively at the contexts in which higher education has operated—and will continue to operate. It also seeks to identify likely developments that will aid those involved in steering higher education forward.

In the aftermath of World War II, America stood alone as the world's premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, burgeoning transnational elite in New York and Washington embraced not only the war's refugees but many of their ideas as well, and nothing has proven more pernicious than those of the Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of "critical theory".

From the leader of the online army in America's parental rights movement comes the real story of how moms and dads across the country are turning the tide against radical activists in public schools. It’s no secret that our government-run public education system has held generations of...

Since the dawn of humanity, the spark of education has lit the fire of “progress.” With our unique ability to learn, we have conquered the animal kingdom, harnessed the power of electricity, and deciphered the secrets of the atom. Yet, for all of this progress, we find ourselves facing a troubling future—from rising global unrest and hopelessness to the specter of deepening inequality to the potential existential threats of climate change and artificial intelligence.

From the former secretary of defense and author of the acclaimed #1 best-selling memoir Duty, a characteristically direct, informed, and urgent assessment of why big institutions are failing us and how smart, committed leadership can effect real improvement regardless of scale.

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 this “sometimes painful, always compelling story of a high-school dropout” (Peter Goldman), Christopher Zara breaks down his winding journey from dropout to journalist and the impact that his background had in the world of privilege. Boldly honest, wryly funny, and utterly open-hearted...

Different minds learn differently. We must pay attention to individual learning patterns, to individual minds so that we can maximize children's performance in school and in life. In A Mind at a Time, Dr. Levine shows us how.

Can we fix the Public Education system in America? Written by an educator with broad experience spanning nearly three decades, this new book suggests that it's already too late. Education’s ongoing failures are feeding on themselves, perpetuating the failed system.

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.

Over the past several years, Jonathan Kozol has visited nearly 60 public schools. Virtually everywhere, he finds that conditions have grown worse for inner-city children in the 15 years since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. First, a state of nearly absolute apartheid now prevails in thousands of our schools. The segregation of Black children has reverted to a level that the nation has not seen since 1968. Few of the students in these schools know White children any longer.