- The Ordeal of Equality
- American schools have always been locally created and controlled. But ever since the Title I program in 1965 appropriated nearly one billion dollars for public schools, federal money and programs have been influencing every school in America. What has been accomplished in this extraordinary assertion of federal influence? What hasn’t? Why not? With incisive clarity and wit, David Cohen and Susan Moffitt argue that enormous gaps existed between policies and programs and the real-world practices that they attempted to change. Learning and teaching are complicated and mysterious. So the means to achieve admirable goals are uncertain, and difficult to develop and sustain, particularly when teachers get little help to cope with the blizzard of new programs, new slogans, new tests, and new rules.
- Saving Schools
- From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning
- “Paul E. Peterson has written a deep and rich history of public education in America and the people and forces that shaped it. He brings together policy, research, and political issues with genuine sophistication and hard-edged thinking. He believes we’re finally poised for a big step forward, using technology to customize the learning experience and empower both students and their families.”
—Joel Klein, Chancellor, New York City Department of Education
- As Good As It Gets
- What School Reform Brought to Austin
- “Cuban is always great—and this is a marvelously level-headed and gripping account of a school reform process we know all too well, told with sympathy for everyone involved. Reminding us how uncertain our certainties often are, Cuban prods, provokes, and teaches.”
—Deborah Meier, author of Many Children Left Behind: How No Child Left Behind Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools
- Speaking Up
- The Unintended Costs of Free Speech in Public Schools
- “How the Supreme Court treats speech cases can be a mirror into that Court’s soul, especially when the cases are about student speech. In this fascinating book, Anne Dupre reveals the deep inconsistencies and drunkard’s reel of the jurisprudence in these cases, from the iconic Tinker through the recent Bong Hits 4 Jesus, and the difficulties that educators now face in regulating even threatening student speech. I have taught these cases many times, and like the kaleidoscope, they shift each time. But I will never look at them quite the same way after reading the story she tells of conflicting principles and no-win situations for teachers.”
—Michael A. Olivas, William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law, University of Houston, and author of The Law and Higher Education: Cases and Materials on Colleges in Court
- The Best of the Best
- Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School
- “In a book that’s both generous and skeptical, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández penetrates the inner world of a top prep school, and shows how the students first construct, and then rationalize, their elite identities. Filled with irony and insight, The Best of the Best reveals both the opportunities and the casualties of privilege.”
—Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, author of The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other
- The Race between Education and Technology
- “A masterful work by two leading economists on some of the biggest issues in economics: economic growth, human capital, and inequality. There are fundamental insights in the book, not just about our past but also our future. Rigorous but not overly technical, this beautifully written book will appeal to educated lay people and economists alike.”
—Steven D. Levitt, University of Chicago, co-author of Freakonomics
“The Race between Education and Technology will stand as the definitive treatment of changes in income distribution and their causes, as well as of possible countervailing policies towards rising inequality. This is empirical economic scholarship at its finest.”
—Lawrence Summers, Harvard University
- Measuring Up
- What Educational Testing Really Tells Us
- “Here we are, lost in Testland, bombarded by data about how well or poorly we or our kids have done on the latest exam. What do test results mean? Every expert has a different explanation. What to do? Read Daniel Koretz’s new book, as soon as possible. Never have I seen a clearer or more sensible exploration of our testing frenzy. I thought one chapter, ‘What Influences Test Scores, or How Not to Pick a School,’ was all by itself worth the price of the book. Read it and relax.”
—Jay Mathews, The Washington Post
