Education Reform

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.

What is the value of a college degree? The four-year college experience is as American as apple pie. So is the belief that higher education offers a ticket to a better life. But with student-loan debt surpassing the $1 trillion mark and unemployment of college graduates at historic highs, people are beginning to question that value. In College (Un)Bound, Jeffrey J. Selingo, editor at large of the Chronicle of Higher Education, argues that America’s higher education system is broken.

In Thinking Differently, David Flink, the leader of Eye to Eye - a national mentoring program for students with learning and attention issues - enlarges our understanding of the learning process and offers powerful, innovative strategies for parenting, teaching, and supporting the 20 percent of students with learning disabilities. An outstanding fighter who has helped thousands of children adapt to their specific learning issues, Flink understands the needs and experiences of these children firsthand.

For over a generation, shocking cases of censorship at America's colleges and universities have taught students the wrong lessons about living in a free society. Drawing on a decade of experience battling for freedom of speech on campus, First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff reveals how higher education fails to teach students to become critical thinkers: by stifling open debate, our campuses are supercharging ideological divisions, promoting groupthink, and encouraging an unscholarly certainty about complex issues.

The ideas that have most helped my clients with their career, relationships, time management, stress management, communication, thinking skills, plus some Big Ideas for improving the world.

Not so long ago, conservative intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. believed universities were worth fighting for. Today, conservatives seem more inclined to burn them down. In Let's Be Reasonable, conservative political theorist and professor Jonathan Marks finds in liberal education an antidote to this despair, arguing that the true purpose of college is to encourage people to be reasonable. Drawing on the ideas of John Locke and other thinkers, Marks presents the case for why, now more than ever, conservatives must not give up on higher education.

Growing up, Reid was confused and disturbed by the different opportunities his best friend received. The gap widened as Reid's classes enabled him to pursue an elite college degree across the country studying educational opportunity and teaching. Then, Reid became a teacher at an under-resourced South Carolina high school where efforts to serve the incredible students were stymied by internal segregation and administrative ambivalence. After Reid assigned students a project to create a positive change, they pushed him to figure out how he, too, could make a bigger difference.

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.

In Failure to Disrupt, Justin Reich delivers a sobering report card on the latest supposedly transformative educational technologies. Reich takes listeners on a tour of MOOCs, autograders, computerized "intelligent tutors", and other educational technologies whose problems and paradoxes have bedeviled educators. Learning technologies often provide the greatest benefit to affluent students and do little to combat growing inequality in education. And institutions and investors often favor programs that scale up quickly, but at the expense of true innovation.

The digital environment has radically changed how and what students need and want to learn, but has educational delivery radically changed? Get ready to be challenged to accommodate today’s learners as opposed to allowing default classroom practices. With its touches of humor and choose-your-own-adventure approach, the audiobook encourages listeners to search for interesting, relevant or required material and then jump right in.

Jamie Merisotis, author of the award-winning 2016 book America Needs Talent, argues that people will coexist with smart machines by learning, earning, and serving others over their lifetimes. But Merisotis asserts large-scale change is necessary to develop and hone the knowledge, skills, and abilities that render us uniquely human. These qualities include compassion, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and interpersonal communication.

We’ve all had great teachers who opened new worlds, maybe even changed our lives. What made them so great? Everyone agrees that a great teacher can have an enormous impact. Yet we still don't know what, precisely, makes a teacher great. Is it a matter of natural-born charisma? Or does exceptional teaching require something more? Building a Better Teacher introduces a new generation of educators exploring the intricate science underlying their art.

Discover a groundbreaking, authoritative guide that illuminates the path to transforming America’s inner cities. BREAKING THE CYCLE: AN INTEGRATED BLUEPRINT FOR TRANSFORMING AMERICA’S INNER CITIES provides a deep, data-driven exploration of the systemic challenges facing urban communities—from educational deficits and health care disparities to chronic unemployment and economic stagnation. This comprehensive work interweaves rigorous economic analysis with inspirational policy insights, offering innovative, real-world solutions designed to empower marginalized communities and break ...

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."

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.

In this down-to-earth guide, Dr. Gillian Parekh unpacks the realities of how ability and disability play out within schooling, including insights from students, teachers, and administrators about the barriers faced by students on the basis of ability. From the challenges with ability testing to gifted programs to the disability rights movement, Parekh shows how ableism is inextricably linked to other forms of bias. Her book is a powerful tool for educators committed to justice-seeking practices in schools.

La invitación a ocupar el cargo de ministro de educación y a liderar una reforma ambiciosa del sistema educativo nunca llega con un manual de instrucciones. Para acometer una tarea de este tipo es necesario tener acceso a los mejores conocimientos sobre cómo implantar cambios educativos con la profundidad necesaria. En este libro, los ministros de educación y máximos responsables de los sistemas educativos de quince países comparten los conocimientos que han adquirido a través de las audaces reformas adoptadas para transformar la educación pública en sus países y para que sus ...

For more than a generation, American education has been structured as though it was built of and for concepts, not people. This has transformed education into a vast assessment, scoring, and ranking enterprise; a sales platform for high-tech entrepreneurs; and a fiercely competitive arena of advantage and status that grinds the poor and propels the middle class into debt. In When the Light Goes On, educator Mike Rose features the stories of people of all ages and backgrounds to illuminate how education has added meaning to their lives.

Based on two years of research, Nice Is Not Enough shares striking dispatches from one high school's "regime of kindness" to underline how the culture operates as a Band-Aid on persistent inequalities. Through incisive storytelling and thoughtful engagement with students, this brilliant study by C. J. Pascoe exposes uncomfortable truths about American politics and our reliance on individual solutions instead of profound systemic change.

From coronavirus lockdowns to critical race theory in the classroom, it has become crystal clear that America’s schools aren’t working for America’s students and parents. No one knows this better than Betsy DeVos. In Hostages No More, DeVos unleashes her candid thoughts about working in the Trump administration, recounts her battles over the decades to put students first, hits back at “woke” curricula in our schools, and details the reforms America must pursue to fix its long and badly broken education system.