Award-winning author, public intellectual, and former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch critiques a lifetime's worth of school reforms and reveals the simple--yet difficult--truth about how we can create actual change in public schools.

"A brilliant young scholar's history of 175 years of teaching in America shows that teachers have always borne the brunt of shifting, often impossible expectations. In other nations, public schools are one thread in a quilt that includes free universal child care, health care, and job training. Here, schools are the whole cloth. Today we look around the world at countries like Finland and South Korea, whose students consistently outscore Americans...

"An in-depth look at the failed efforts to privatize public schools and the victories of those who have fought to save America's public school system"--

Looks at why many of America's schools are failing and relates how parents, activists, and education reformers are joining together to fix a system that works for adults but consistently fails the children it is meant to educate.

The acclaimed exploration of how public education can cultivate innovators-with a foreword by Russlynn Ali, a leading advocate for remaking schools Dime-a-dozen ideas for reforming education seem to be everywhere these days but few actually transform the everyday experience of the 50-million-plus students who are regularly subjected to traditional lecturing, note-taking, and rote learning-often with dismal results. Enter Deeper Learning, "a fast read...

Hamilton High Principal Wendell Quinn is tired of the violence, drug abuse, teen pregnancies, and low expectations at his Indianapolis school. A single father of four, Quinn is a Christian and a family man. He wants to see change in his community, so he starts a voluntary after-school Bible Study and prayer program. He knows he is risking his job by leading the program, but the high turnout at every meeting encourages him. A year later, violence and...

Why School? is a little book driven by big questions. What does it mean to be educated? What is intelligence? How should we think about intelligence, education, and opportunity in an open society? Drawing on forty years of teaching and research, award-winning author Mike Rose reflects on these and other questions related to public schooling in America. He answers them in beautifully written chapters that are both rich in detail and informed by an...

Kent Greenawalt is University Professor teaching at the Columbia University School of Law, and a former Deputy Solicitor General of the United States. He is the author of Religious Convictions and Political Choice, Private Consciences and Public Reasons, Fighting Words (Princeton), and Religion and the Constitution: Volume 1: Free Exercise and Fairness (also Princeton). Controversial Supreme Court decisions have barred organized school prayer, but...

"What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children--but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way 'this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do.' Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling...