Which five books on educational reform should I read?

Try reading The retreat from race: Asian-American admissions and racial politics by Dana Y. Takagi. It's one of my favorites. Any books you've found interesting so far?

Diane Ravitch's book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education," illustrates and analyzes from a historical perspective all of the educational reform movements in the U.S. It's a must read: http://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465014917.

Great book and should be required for all teachers to help understand the reasons for the push for testing, teacher accountability, and charter schools.

I liked the book by Dan Willingham's, Why Don't Students Like School? It has ideas that schools could implement and are backed by research. Plus it has great section on how to improve your teaching and for administrators to foster better educators.

This book brings some very interesting observations to the surface! Why do kids play games for hours and hours, yet we cannot get them to study for their history test for one hour? What is it about games that keeps them so engaged, eager, and hungry for more, even when they fail at the game? Wouldn't it be interesting if we could find out and BRING THAT INTO THE CLASSROOM. Well, Jane has written an incredible book that addresses that head on. If you a teacher who wants to consider a different way forward in eduction...RUN....don't walk to the bookstore to get this book.

I really enjoyed reading DEEPER LEARNING: 7 Powerful Strategies for In-Depth and Longer Lasting Learning by Eric Jensen and LeAnn Nickelsen this summer. This book gives great ideas, background on how the brain processes learning, and how to make lessons that will create meaningful learning based on how the brain learns. It also includes concrete and specific ideas for cooperative learning, role playing,pre- assessments, and creating a great learning environment.

Try reading LOST AT SCHOOL by Ross W. Greene. It is an eye-opener in recognizing that social/emotional learning should be differentiated as much as academic instruction. It assumes that students will do well if they can. If they don't do well, then they lack the social skills to do it. Rewards and/or punishments don't teach those skills. This book advocates really talking to individual students to get to the "why" of their behavior choices as a means to identify those "lagging skills". If worked at through this perspective, the changes in behavior are gradual, but permanent, allowing the student and the teacher to refocus on the academics. Until behavior is productive, attempting to teach/learn academics is nonproductive for teacher and student. Overall the time taken to confront these lagging social skills is less than the time taken on a daily basis to ineffectually address the resulting maladaptive behaviors. I highly recommend this book. It would truly be a reformation in education if seriously considered and applied.

Excellent suggestion!

Here are 3 I would like to suggest:

• The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Kozol.

• You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times by Zinn.

• As others here have, I also recommend Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

Good luck deciding-- so many powerful books out there!

Rebecca Alber
Edutopia

My recommendation is to read books that deal not directly with education, but with leaders, decision-making, management and shifting thinking paradigm. A great book, a little rusty on the shelves but as smart and eye-opener as you'll ever encounter, is Gerry Nadler's Breakthrough Thinking. He also wrote Smart Questions (2004) - which is wonderful, and one of his educational "oldies": SPARK - Student Planned Acquisition of Required Knowledge (a case study in a school).
Enjoy!