Misguided Education Reform: Debating the Impact on Students argues for reforms that will help, not hurt, America’s public school students. Early childhood education, testing, reading, special education, discipline, loss of the arts, and school facilities, are all areas experiencing reform in the wrong direction. This book says “no” to the reforms that fail, and challenges Americans to address the real student needs that will fix public schools and make America strong.

From David Osborne, the author of Reinventing Government--a biting analysis of the failure of America's public schools and a comprehensive plan for revitalizing American education. In Reinventing America's Schools, David Osborne, one of the world's foremost experts on public sector reform, offers a comprehensive analysis of the charter school movements and presents a theory that will do for American schools what his New York Times bestseller Reinventing Government did for public governance in 1992. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city got an unexpected opportunity to recreate their school system from scratch. The state's Recovery School District (RSD), created to turn around failing schools, gradually transformed all of its New Orleans schools into charter schools, and the results are shaking the very foundations of American education. Test scores, school performance scores, graduation and dropout rates, ACT scores, college-going rates, and independent studies all tell the same story: the city's RSD schools have tripled their effectiveness in eight years. Now other cities are following suit, with state governments reinventing failing schools in Newark, Camden, Memphis, Denver, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Oakland. In this book, Osborne uses compelling stories from cities like New Orleans and lays out the history and possible future of public education. Ultimately, he uses his extensive research to argue that in today's world, we should treat every public school like a charter school and grant them autonomy, accountability, diversity of school designs, and parental choice.

"A brilliant demonstration of what philosophy can do and how it is essential to human integrity and identity." —Simon Critchley, coeditor of The Stone Reader In What Philosophy Can Do, Gary Gutting takes a philosopher’s scalpel to modern life’s biggest questions and the most powerful forces in our society—politics, science, religion, education, and capitalism. Along the way, he introduces readers to powerful philosophical tools, from inductive and deductive logic to the Principle of Charity, which they can use to make better sense of current debates. Interweaving his discussion of contemporary issues with philosophical concepts from Aristotle to Michel Foucault and John Rawls, Gutting shows how philosophy can enrich public discussions about our most urgent issues.

The prize-winning PBS correspondent's provocative antidote to America’s misguided approaches to K-12 school reform During an illustrious four-decade career at NPR and PBS, John Merrow—winner of the George Polk Award, the Peabody Award, and the McGraw Prize—reported from every state in the union, as well as from dozens of countries, on everything from the rise of district-wide cheating scandals and the corporate greed driving an ADD epidemic to teacher-training controversies and America’s obsession with standardized testing. Along the way, he taught in a high school, at a historically black college, and at a federal penitentiary. Now, the revered education correspondent of PBS NewsHour distills his best thinking on education into a twelve-step approach to fixing a K–12 system that Merrow describes as being “addicted to reform” but unwilling to address the real issue: American public schools are ill-equipped to prepare young people for the challenges of the twenty-first century. This insightful book looks at how to turn digital natives into digital citizens and why it should be harder to become a teacher but easier to be one. Merrow offers smart, essential chapters—including “Measure What Matters,” and “Embrace Teachers”—that reflect his countless hours spent covering classrooms as well as corridors of power. His signature candid style of reportage comes to life as he shares lively anecdotes, schoolyard tales, and memories that are at once instructive and endearing. Addicted to Reform is written with the kind of passionate concern that could come only from a lifetime devoted to the people and places that constitute the foundation of our nation. It is a “big book” that forms an astute and urgent blueprint for providing a quality education to every American child.

In this authoritative history of American education reforms in this century, a distinguished scholar makes a compelling case that our schools fail when they consistently ignore their central purpose--teaching knowledge.

From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, Slaying Goliath is an impassioned, inspiring look at the ways in which parents, teachers, and activists are successfully fighting back to defeat the forces that are trying to privatize America’s public schools. Diane Ravitch writes of a true grassroots movement sweeping the country, from cities and towns across America, a movement dedicated to protecting public schools from those who are funding privatization and who believe that America’s schools should be run like businesses and that children should be treated like customers or products. Slaying Goliath is about the power of democracy, about the dangers of plutocracy, and about the potential of ordinary people—armed like David with only a slingshot of ideas, energy, and dedication—to prevail against those who are trying to divert funding away from our historic system of democratically governed, nonsectarian public schools. Among the lessons learned from the global pandemic of 2020 is the importance of our public schools and their teachers and the fact that distance learning can never replace human interaction, the pesonal connection between teachers and students.

In his latest educational exposé, internationally acclaimed author and scholar, Professor David Hopkins, places established and emerging ideas about effective school and system improvement under scrutiny. Exploding the Myths of School Reform confronts real-world challenges and perspectives from research, policy and practice, and draws on international benchmarking studies to support its objectives and claims. With each of ten chapters addressing a perceptible fallacy - such as the myths that poverty determines performance, that achievement cannot be realised at scale, that innovation and networking always add value and that it is curriculum rather than learning that counts - this groundbreaking manifesto is set to provoke and persuade. Through its carefully structured narrative highlighting areas of universal concern, the book presents a compelling approach to school reform, designed to enhance not only academic performance, but also the potential for students to learn. Teachers, school leaders, directors, policy makers and researchers—educationalists from across the board—will find the instructive frameworks and 'codas' for systemic change at all levels disarmingly simple to understand and apply. The same values and strategies that uphold social equity are shown to also promote quality in teaching, strong system leadership, regional capacity building and whole school design. Replete with explanatory diagrams, Exploding the Myths of School Reform contributes with depth and precision to the contemporary debate about the direction of schools and school systems, the possibilities and issues most likely to be encountered by leaders today and tomorrow, and the means to instigate authentic and lasting reform.