Recommended Reading List
Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education, by Joe Williams, Director of Democrats for School Choice
Journalist Joe Williams shows how parents can use consumer power to put children first, shining light on the special interests controlling our schools, where politics and pork infuse everything and our children’s education is compromised, . He argues that increased accountability and choice are necessary, and shows how the people can take back the education system, enhancing responsibility inherent in democracy. The solution is a new brand of hardball politics that demands competence from school leaders and shifts the power away from bureaucrats and union leaders to the people who have a the greatest reason to put kids first: concerned parents. With practical steps and uplifting examples of success, this is a manifesto to action.
The Knowledge Deficit by E.D. Hirst, Jr.
Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children
by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
“We will achieve a just and prosperous society only when schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared knowledge to communicate effectively with everyone else.”
— E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Everybody knows that an achievement gap exists in American schools. Everybody knows that American students do not perform as well on standardized tests as do their peers in other developed countries. But despite dollars spent and bills passed, there is no consensus on how to solve this problem.
In The Knowledge Deficit, noted education expert E. D. Hirsch, Jr., maps a way to close this achievement gap. He first describes the problem: many students, even those who have mastered reading skills early and quite well, begin to slide after fourth grade and fail at more difficult comprehension tasks. Why? Because skills instruction, alone, cannot compensate for lack of background knowledge — for the plenitude of facts and experiences required to understand more complex subjects.
The Knowledge Deficit provides the map for creating a content-rich education that leads to reading mastery and to success on standardized and state tests. It is the culmination of decades of work in which Hirsch has explored these problems in classrooms; researched the latest scientific thinking on the brain’s development; compared state, national, and international curricula; and tested his theories in both public and private schools across the country. The one must-read book for American educators today
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, by Clayton Christensen
A crash course in the business of learning-from the bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution…
“A brilliant teacher, Christensen brings clarity to a muddled and chaotic world of education.”
-Jim Collins, bestselling author of Good to Great
According to recent studies in neuroscience, the way we learn doesn’t always match up with the way we are taught. If we hope to stay competitive-academically, economically, and technologically-we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence, reevaluate our educational system, and reinvigorate our commitment to learning. In other words, we need “disruptive innovation.”
Now, in his long-awaited new book, Clayton M. Christensen and coauthors Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson take one of the most important issues of our time-education-and apply Christensen’s now-famous theories of “disruptive” change using a wide range of real-life examples. Whether you’re a school administrator, government official, business leader, parent, teacher, or entrepreneur, you’ll discover surprising new ideas, outside-the-box strategies, and straight-A success stories.
You’ll learn how
Customized learning will help many more students succeed in school
Student-centric classrooms will increase the demand for new technology
Computers must be disruptively deployed to every student
Disruptive innovation can circumvent roadblocks that have prevented other attempts at school reform
We can compete in the global classroom-and get ahead in the global market
Filled with fascinating case studies, scientific findings, and unprecedented insights on how innovation must be managed, Disrupting Class will open your eyes to new possibilities, unlock hidden potential, and get you to think differently. Professor Christensen and his coauthors provide a bold new lesson in innovation that will help you make the grade for years to come.
The future is now. Class is in session.
Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation, by Bob Wise
Written by Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and current president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, Raising the Grade describes the alarming cost of our long-time neglect of secondary education. At a time when technology and postsecondary education requirements are rising dramatically in the workforce, the literacy skills of adolescents are not keeping pace. With most federal dollars targeted to elementary schools and higher education, few resources are allocated to improve high schools, to address the achievement gap threatening nearly 6 million students at risk of dropping out in the United States. Raising the Grade is rooted in the stories of real Americans whose high school experiences failed to engage or adequately prepare them for work or college.
Two Million Minutes: a Global Examination. Documentary film about education. Bob Compton, executive producer
Personally, I know that China and India are not “Third World” countries, but that is because I’ve traveled to those countries and I deeply admire their cultures and their people.
The inspiration for the name “Third World Challenge” came a statement made to me by a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education when I showed my film Two Million Minutes for the HGSE faulty. “We have nothing to learn from education systems in Third World countries,” he intoned with much gravitas, “Much less a Third World country that lacks freedom of speech.” To my surprise, no other faculty member rose to challenge that statement.
While I certainly expected a more open-minded and globally aware audience at Harvard, I have now screened my film around the country and a surprisingly large segment of the American population believes India and China’s K-12 education systems are inferior to that of the United States. While no American makes the statement with the boundless hubris of a Harvard professor, the conclusion often is the same – America is number one in education and always will be.
This of course is not true. American students’ academic achievement has been declining vis-à-vis other developed countries for more than 20 years. What is now surprising and worrisome is US students are even lagging the developing world.
If our athletic performance at the Olympics were as poor as our global academic performance it would be a national crisis and every level of government would be attempting to respond. That we blithely ignore the declining intellectual standards of American students seems almost insane. The cognitive skills of our children will determine both America’s economic future and the economic future of each child.
But perhaps I overstate the high standards of the developing world, particularly India and China. So, to test that assumption, my company Indian Math Online has created the “Third World Challenge” – this is a shortened and greatly simplified version of the multi-day proficiency test that every 10th grader in India must pass to go on to the 11th grade.
Think American education standards are higher than the Third World – well why not have your 11th or 12th grade son or daughter try the Third World Challenge? After all in just a few more years the challenge will be in the marketplace for high paying jobs – might as well find out now if your son or daughter is competitive.
Executive Producer
Two Million Minutes
