Social Sciences Education

Malcolm Gladwell has long relished the opportunity to skewer the upper echelons of higher education, from the institution of U.S. News & World Report’s Best College rankings to the LSATs to the luxe Bowdoin College cafeteria. I Hate the Ivy League: Riffs and Rants on Elite Education, upends the traditional thinking around how education should work and tries to get to the bottom of why we often reward the wrong people.

Getting into a top-ranked college has never seemed more impossible, with acceptance rates at some elite universities dipping into the single digits. In Who Gets in and Why, journalist and higher education expert Jeffrey Selingo dispels entrenched notions of how to compete and win at the admissions game and reveals that teenagers and parents have much to gain by broadening their notion of what qualifies as a "good college". Hint: It's not all about the sticker on the car window.

Teacher Misery perfectly encapsulates the comical misery that has become the teaching profession. Jane Morris's strange, funny, and sometimes unbelievable teaching experiences are told through a collection of short stories, essays, and artifacts including real emails from parents, students, and administrators. From the parents who blame their son's act of arson on the teacher for causing him low self-esteem to the student who offers to teach the teacher how to sell drugs so she can pay her bills, one story is more shocking than the next.

Wise Black women have known for centuries that the blues have been a platform for truth-telling, an underground musical railroad to survival, and an essential form of resistance, healing, and learning. In her highly anticipated follow-up to the widely acclaimed Pushout, now a core text for teachers and principals on the criminalization of Black girls in schools, leading advocate Monique W. Morris invokes the spirit of the blues to articulate a radically healing and empowering pedagogy for Black and Brown girls.

As the culture wars rage, and masculinity has been politicized from all sides, feminist writer and mother of three boys Ruth Whippman finds herself conflicted and scared. While the right pushes a dangerous vision of fantasy manhood, her feminist peers often dismiss boys as little more than entitled predators-in-waiting. Meanwhile her home life feels like a daily confrontation with the triumph of nature over nurture.

Throughout Lewis and Clark for Dummies, you find out about Jefferson's western exploration from his earliest efforts to see the Corps assembled through the aftermath for the explorers, the tribes, and the United States. But the focus of Lewis & Clark for Dummies is on the period between Jefferson's confidential letter to Congress requesting dollars to mount a western exploration (January 18,1803) and the expedition's triumphant (and improbable) return to St. Louis (September 23, 1806): 42 months that changed the world.

In the tradition of Dale Russakoff's The Prize and Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars, Wexler brings together history, research, and compelling characters to pull back the curtain on this fundamental flaw in our education system - one that fellow reformers, journalists, and policymakers have long overlooked, and of which the general public, including many parents, remains unaware.

Moses and Troy Horne here. Your mental-toughness guides! We know exactly how you feel. If you are reading this, you probably have a young athlete who struggles with in-game stress and maybe even sports performance anxiety. That is why this version was mostly written by Moses. As of the time of the writing of this book, Moses Horne is a 15-year-old elite athlete who can talk directly about the triumphs and struggles of working toward being mentally tough. This is the only book that I know of with input from an actual young athlete.

From best-selling author Jon Krakauer, a stark, powerful, meticulously reported narrative about a series of sexual assaults at the University of Montana - stories that illuminate the human drama behind the national plague of campus rape.

At least 12 million people listen to Osgood every day on CBS radio, and millions more watch him on CBS News Sunday Morning. All of them would agree that no one delivers quite the way he does the offbeat stories that make listeners stop and pay attention; the commentaries in which he shares his sense of wonder, dismay, or amusement; the well-spun tales of irony that often burst forth into wordplay or even poetry.

Whether we like it or not, the AI revolution is coming to education. In Brave New Words, Salman Khan, the visionary behind Khan Academy, explores how artificial intelligence and GPT technology will transform learning, and offers a road map for teachers, parents, and students to navigate this exciting (and sometimes intimidating) new world. A pioneer in the field of education technology, Khan examines the ins and outs of these cutting-edge tools and how they will revolutionize the way we learn and teach.

This is the book that launched William F. Buckley, Jr.'s career. As a young, recent Yale graduate, he took on Yale's professional and administrative staffs, citing their hypocritical diversion from the tenets on which the institution was built. Yale was founded on the belief that God exists, and thus that virtue and individualism represent immutable cornerstones of education. However, when Buckley wrote this scathing expose, the institution had made an about face.

Beginning with the story of a simple burglary at Democratic headquarters and then continuing with headline after headline, Bernstein and Woodward kept the tale of conspiracy and the trail of dirty tricks coming - delivering the stunning revelations and pieces in the Watergate puzzle that brought about Nixon's scandalous downfall. Their explosive reports won a Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post and toppled the president. This is the book that changed America.

Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect opponents. Now, those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself. And yet, rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will hold important government positions, fight constitutional lawsuits, and advise Fortune 500 companies. In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty—it’s institutional weakness.

Raised in Miami and the daughter of Cuban refugees, Crucet examines the political and personal contours of American identity and the physical places where those contours find themselves smashed: be it a rodeo town in Nebraska, a university campus in upstate New York, or Disney World in Florida. Crucet illuminates how she came to see her exclusion from aspects of the theoretical American Dream, despite her family's attempts to fit in with white American culture - beginning with their ill-fated plan to name her after the winner of the Miss America pageant.

Bar candidates are required to memorize massive quantities of law, frequently written by some of the the world's best authors—the justices of the United States Supreme Court. Mining the rule of law from complex decisions is no easy feat. Enter this audiobook, a concise, all-encompassing reference to the rules required for passing the bar exam. Sorted by essay topic, this book balances the listing all required elements and keeping it simple, with one goal in mind—compiling all of the necessary rules in a format that is easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to recall.

In her memoir, Power offers an urgent response to the question "What can one person do?" and a call for a clearer eye, a kinder heart, and a more open and civil hand in our politics and daily lives. The Education of an Idealist traces Power’s distinctly American journey from immigrant to war correspondent to presidential Cabinet official. In 2005, her critiques of US foreign policy caught the eye of newly elected senator Barack Obama, who invited her to work with him on Capitol Hill and then on his presidential campaign.

In 1974, a federal judge ruled that Boston’s public schools were unconstitutionally segregated. The solution? A controversial experiment in desegregation known as “busing,” which would take children from majority-white schools and bus them to predominantly Black schools, and vice versa. In this dramatic audiobook full of surprising twists and fascinating characters, journalist Leon Neyfakh unpacks the history of busing in Boston and brings to life the human stories behind the headlines by talking to the people who saw what happened with their own eyes.

It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal - that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding - reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream.

To close the achievement gap, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement. Culturally responsive instruction has shown promise, but many teachers have struggled with its implementation—until now. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.