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I couldn’t resist weighing in this week even though I will be brief. I won’t attempt to share descriptions or commentaries on my picks given that they are likely familiar to most readers.

Following is a list of some of my spring/summer reading that I would recommend any educator or education policy-maker read or reread.

I read Teaching as Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap (Farr/Teach for America, 2010), Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling (Hess, 2010), and Working for Kids: Education Leadership as Inquiry and Invention (Lytle, 2010).

I reread Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (Christensen, 2008), Common Sense School Reform (Hess, 2004), There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (Kotlowitz, 1991), and No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 2003).

I was also fortunate to read the manuscript for an upcoming book edited by Hess and Osberg, Stretching the School Dollar: How Schools and Districts Can Save Money While Serving Students Best. This is going to be a very important resource for education leaders in our economically challenged state, and I would guess others across the country would similarly benefit from it.

It would be hard to say I’m unbiased in recommending a book by veteran education journalist and Ed Trust senior writer Karin Chenoweth. But How It's Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools is a must-read for everyone committed to the goal of education equity. It provides valuable insight into the impressive achievements of eight high-minority and high-poverty schools from various settings across the country—schools that defy the ill-conceived notion that achievement gaps are inevitable.

Karin doesn’t simply identify campuses with strong results for low-income students and students of color. She shares concrete details about how educators helped their students reach exceptional levels of academic success. Among them is Norfork Elementary School in Arkansas, which is located in a community known as the methamphetamine capital of the Ozarks. The results of the intentional strategies adopted by the school’s administrators and teachers speak for themselves: Despite high rates of poverty—both in the school and throughout the community—88 percent of Norfork’s sixth-grade students read at a “proficient” or “advanced” level.

The stories are inspiring, but How It’s Being Done does far more than inspire. This book outlines the road map each school followed to reach extraordinary heights. After all, success is no fluke. These schools earned positive results by using practical and concrete strategies to help students learn at the highest levels.

Not all of the schools featured are recent “turnarounds,” but some certainly are. And their stories should be particularly instructive during the coming year, when state and local officials turn their attention to improving of the lowest performing schools in their states.

Anyone interested in learning how some previously struggling schools turned the corner will find Karin’s book to be valuable reading.

I just finished my annual re-reading of Parker Palmer’s “The Courage to Teach.” Published in 1997, the book successfully predicted the most gut-wrenching aspect of education reform: teachers and their practice struggling against the effects of government policies.

But Palmer did more than identify the problem, he proposed a solution for teachers (one that I don’t think anyone else has proposed), a solution that, if teachers took it seriously, would shake reform to its core. If you want to know what teaching is really like, and if you want to know what teaching during reform is really like, there is still no better book in my opinion than this one.

Tomorrow, I will begin teaching pre-service teachers taking what I believe is the single most important course in their major: Foundations of Reading. As I look over the syllabus in preparation, I see well over 150 topics and techniques that we will cover this semester. I see, too, that most of these topics and techniques, while based in successful classroom practice and contemporary research, will be off-limits to my students when they become teachers.

There are no districts I know where teachers—much less first-year teachers—could use even a quarter of the practices in which I will train them. So I will actually be teaching two classes this semester: one on how to be a great reading teacher and another on how to be a great reading teacher without getting fired.

There’s nothing inherent in any reform policy I know of that prohibits great teaching. And yet, great teaching is increasingly prohibited in our schools. The culprit is not federal or state policy per se but the district and school culture it in inspires.

Having all teachers teach the same way is now the most valued goal in most schools where I work. This means that strict scope and sequence programs, with tightly defined lessons, are broadly adopted. In order to accommodate teachers with minimal skills, and meet the goal of installing programs that everyone can teach, the instructional approaches chosen must be simplistic, traditional, and focused on the development of generic skills. Contemporary research-based “best practice” instruction cannot be tolerated. Differentiation is non-existent.

The new motto in most of the schools where I work, especially where elementary reading is concerned, is “No thinking required.” Every minute of every classroom session is specified by a program. All a district has to do is adopt the program, make implementing it part of teacher evaluations, and bingo! Instant conformity.

Ultimately, the most influential effect of reform—though surely not its intention—has been the standardization of mindless teaching practice including excessive test preparation. But if all teachers teach the same way, things are a lot easier to measure. And if more measurements can be taken, more decisions can be made based on measurements rather than on thoughtful human judgment. In my most absurd fantasies, I see a principal somewhere defending himself against censure for firing a teacher by saying, "The data made me do it!" Not all schools are like this. But many are. And I notice many more make the move to standardized instruction each year.

To tell my students about this situation, and to help them understand Palmer’s solution as I have applied it in my career, I wrote a short book review of “The Courage to Teach” which you will find below.

You’ll note, I think, that the same corrosive division that Palmer warned us about thirteen years ago is exactly what I just expressed in my feeling of having to teach two classes this semester instead of just one—a class about reading and a class about how to get away with teaching it well.

The divisions that we see in our political discourse on education fester inside almost every teacher, dividing them from themselves. Until we begin to support teachers in living what Palmer calls “the undivided life”, it seems unlikely that teaching will improve to meet the goals our nation has set for student achievement.

THE COURAGE TO READ THIS BOOK: A Short Review of Parker Palmer's "The Courage to Teach"

I don’t remember the first time I read Parker Palmer’s “The Courage to Teach”. It’s not that I don’t remember the book, it’s just that I’ve read it now maybe ten or twelve times, and I can’t pin down the first enactment of this annual ritual.

I re-read the book either after the school year is over, so I can reflect on my experience through Palmer’s unique lens, or just before school begins, as I did this year, so I can ground myself in his wisdom. While I have many favorite teacher books, this is beyond a mere favorite; perhaps it’s something like an addiction.

Each paragraph is practically a course in itself, such is the density of Palmer’s thinking; I’ve never encountered a writer who could cram so much truth into so few words. And truth is really what this book is after: What’s the truth about teaching? Palmer knows—and it isn’t pretty.

No one in my experience has ever captured, the way Palmer has here, what it feels like to be a teacher. Most teacher books are about doing things to help kids learn or having more success and fulfillment in our work. “The Courage to Teach” is not a “doing” or a “having” book; it’s a “being” book. I think it’s the most important book ever written about being a teacher because, of the thousands of teachers I’ve worked with, so few seem ever to find a way to be—especially a way to be happy in their work.

Now, more than ever, teaching seems to me a tragic profession. If, after 15 years of documented success, and well over a million words published about teaching and learning, I am regularly assaulted by the system for merely trying to teach, I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who have less professional cover than I do—including the ultimate freedom of just walking away from any school that insists on hiring me primarily for the purpose of beating me up and dragging me down to their level.

It’s never been easy being a teacher, but it certainly is a lot harder now, and it’s getting harder all the time. Sure, it’s easy to get certified, and if the economy’s decent, or you don’t mind teaching in a rural area, it’s easy to find a job. But deep down inside, where Palmer wants to take us, being a teacher is frightening. Perhaps that’s why he wants to give us the courage we need to do it well and the emotional toolkit we need to build lives for ourselves in education that are rich, full, and satisfying.

The last chapter, “Divided No More”, is my favorite by far. Here Palmer answers the toughest question of all: How can I be who I am as a teacher when my principal, my department, my district, my state—everyone it seems at times—is telling me to be the teacher they want me to be?

Palmer points out that virtually all teachers face this pressure and that, as a result, most give in to what he calls “the divided life.” Once divided from our ture nature by the demands of others that conflict with our basic beliefs, teaching becomes an almost daily war within ourselves as part of us tries to fight for what we think is right, while the other part gives in to the fear of being wrong—and of being punished for being wrong.

The result is that we suppress the best of who we are and begin becoming someone we aren’t. Living the divided life is worse than living half a life because, in fact, we’re living no life at all. We willingly give up the experience we’ve always cherished in exchange for what can be described at best as an uncomfortable and unnatural conformity. Such is the cost of the go-along-to-get-along strategy that seems so insidiously prevalent in our profession.

Palmer’s hope for us is that we realize that conforming is more harmful than confronting. Simply being ourselves, even if we are punished for it, is the best course of action. Palmer wants us to live “divided no more”. As he writes, “The courage to live divided no more, and to face the punishment that will follow, comes from this simple insight: no punishment anyone lays on you could possibly be worse than the punishment you lay on yourself by conspiring in your own diminishment.”

Do you ever feel small as a teacher? Do you ever feel that somehow you are shrinking just a little day by day? I do sometimes. But when the feeling hits me, and I replay Palmer’s words, I know it’s me, not them, and this helps me remember that if I am the source of my unhappiness, I am also the source of my salvation. When I accept that I am willingly conspiring against myself, I know that I have the power to end the conspiracy, and this is where I get the courage to teach.

I would say this book is not for the feint of heart because the truth is that it is all heart. The book presents nothing more or less than the soul-shattering truth of what it’s like to be a teacher. I realize every time I read it that when I blame another person or policy for why I can’t teach the way I know is best for me and for the people I am trying to help that I am just looking at the other half of my divided self in the mirror. Breaking the conspiracy means breaking the mirror. But what will happen then?

And then it hits me: What punishment could anyone mete out against me that would be worse than the punishment I am meting out against myself? The truth is, every time I have asserted myself in teaching, I have been rewarded at the very least by a rush of vitality. The worst punishment I have ever received, even for my most outlandish transgressions, has been some form of impotent verbal censure often delivered by a person who is obviously in so much more pain than I am. And as this speaks person speaks, he grows smaller and smaller before my very eyes.

In perpetrating this meaningless and inconsequential act of censure, my accuser always seems to discover at some moment in our interaction that I was just trying to be the best teacher I could be. And in that moment, the tormentor becomes the tormented. This person attempting to punish me begins to punish himself by splitting in two and conspiring so aggressively in his own diminishment that I end up standing stronger and taller in the end. It is he, not me, who shrinks away almost to nothing as his condemnation of my conduct trails off into an awkward silence, after which, if I am composed and at my best, I rise slowly, thank him for his feedback, and leave the room—divided no more.

I generally try to take a break from just work-related education reading in the summer. In addition to catching up on old magazines that pile up, here are the non-work related books I read, followed by a couple of edubooks I did, too. Of course, since education is a human endeavor with human behavior front and center, plenty of parallels from all of them.

This year I decided to learn more about the early years of Forest Service fire-fighting so I reread the classic "Young Men and Fire" by Norman MacLean (U of Chicago Press), which is at once fascinating and moving no matter how many times you read it. It's the story of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana that killed 13 firefighters including 12 smokejumpers who had jumped the fire only about two hours earlier. That was a prelude (though chronologically a postlude) to Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). This year is the 100 year anniversary of the fire that burned a large swath of Idaho and Montana and Egan's book is an engaging look at what happened and what it meant going forward -- including implications for what happened at Mann Gulch 39 years later.

I also wanted to know what might be in store for the Redskins so I read Stefan Fatsis' "Three Seconds of Panic" (Penguin). Fatsis is a Plimpton-like character who managed to kick preseason with the Broncos when Mike Shanahan was running the show there. It's a look into the mind of Mike as well as the bizarre world of the NFL in general and placekickers in particular. One takeaway: Albert Haynesworth may not have thought this whole thing through with his new coach.

Also, with two horse-crazy four-year old girls at home, Misty of Chincoteague is big in our house right now.

And Patrick Dillon and (former longtime National Journal White House correspondent) Carl Cannon have a great book out about the rise and fall of class action attorney Bill Lerach, the man John Doerr once referred to as "a cunning economic terrorist." Terrific summer book they should make into a movie. "Circle of Greed" (Broadway) neither lionizes nor condemns Lerach. As I heard Lerach himself say at a party about the book, if someone has to go over your life like this get Dillon and Cannon to do it because while they're tough they're equally fair.

More directly on the education front (sorta) is "The Boys from Little Mexico" (Beacon) by Steve Wilson. Even if you don't follow soccer (I don't) it's compelling with larger implications for our educational institutions. Well worth reading. And completely on the education front is John Merrow's cri de coeur "Below C Level." Merrow's been watching this for a while, he's frustrated. Both books will frustrate you, too, and should get you ready to dive back into a season of work this fall.

As I thought about the best book to add to this list, I realized (thanks in large measure to recent conversations with fellow ed reformers Linc Caplan and Robin Golden) that the book I want to recommend doesn’t exist yet. What I want to read this summer and share with others is the Omnivore’s Dilemma of education – a book that would clearly communicate the urgency of reforming our education system and make that urgency tangible and actionable for laypeople, even (or especially) those who might not have realized they were interested in education before.

Fixing our public education system is something that everyone should care about, and it’s probably something more people would care about if they knew what all the issues were. But that’s kind of the point. In Connecticut, we have found that part of the reason we’ve tolerated the status quo for so long is that people just don’t know – or don’t believe – that 1) we have such a huge problem on our hands and 2) practical solutions are readily within our grasp. Yet as we say at ConnCAN, “being right is not enough.” It takes more than imparting information to inspire action. What we need is the book that tells such an undeniable story that people can’t turn a blind eye anymore – and that reads so well it goes viral and tops bestseller lists overall, not merely the specialized ones for education.

This book would connect the dots between kids not being adequately educated today and a very scary picture of tomorrow. We already know that if you don’t get a good education, you are more likely not to graduate from high school, to go to jail, and to earn much less than your potential. What we haven’t worked through yet are the profound consequences of a system in which American kids are much less prepared than their parents were to enter the world they will face as adults. This is about nothing less than securing the very future of our society, and we need widespread systemic action if we’re going to change our trajectory.

Granted, Michael Pollan’s Ominvore’s Dilemma resonates most strongly among a fairly select cultural segment, and it is not about to put factory farming and fast food out of business. But there is a genuine mass movement beginning to take shape around Pollan’s ideas, in no small measure because of the very compelling way he expressed them.

There have been some encouraging recent efforts in this direction, but I’m still looking for the book that will paint a picture so compelling that readers who have never thought about it before will take it upon themselves to act in the name of education reform.

Let’s hope we all get to read it sooner rather than later.

We’re lucky to work in a field with a lot (!) of excellent writing – statistical analyses, political recaps, opinionated blogs, inspiring start-up stories, and an endless Tweet-stream. That said, picking a winner in this crowded field is easy: Karin Chenoweth’s How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools. (Chenoweth is a longtime reporter and education writer, currently hanging her flak jacket at EdTrust.)

What Chenoweth does better than anyone out there is to tell the story of ordinary schools doing extraordinary things. This book is a follow-up to her first volume – It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools. It’s Being Done shows us unequivocally – via stories of 15 schools – that there are educators who can and are educating all children to high standards, regardless of poverty, discrimination, family circumstances, et al. In many ways How It’s Being Done is the harder book and the more important one; here Chenoweth digs deep into eight successful public schools (one charter) and cogently and persuasively shows us the “how” behind their success.

There’s a lot to love in this book, but a few things resonate specifically:

1) Chenoweth tells stories that are not being told elsewhere. Highly successful, traditional public schools tend to get short shrift in the press. This is no slight to beating-the-odds charters who richly deserve to have their stories told, but without coverage of terrific “regular” public schools the public would wrongly be left to believe that the only successful public schools are charters.

2) While telling the individual story of a school and its leaders, teachers, and students so well, Chenoweth doesn’t take her eye of the (big, systemic) ball. The book is really about how we can turn Secretary Duncan’s “islands of educational excellence” into a country of high-performing schools. In fact, the book opens by looking at the last 15 years of work in Massachusetts, asking what it took to make that state the national education leader. The book doesn’t tell stories just to tell stories; it shares the work of these tremendous educators so we can spread what they’re doing far and wide.

3) Chenoweth’s analysis goes deep. As she tells us in the introduction: “Lots of educators around the country have high expectations and work hard without being particularly successful, and they deserve more information about how It’s Being Done schools work.” Wanting to avoid the trap of a list that any educator could check off (e.g., we have high expectations, we use data), Chenoweth takes the time to examine and analyze how and what each school is doing in an attempt to make these case studies applicable to many, many other schools.

4) The book is grounded in rigorous data analysis. Each of the profiled schools has won an Education Trust Dispelling the Myth award, which are given to high-poverty and high-minority schools with proven and sustained high achievement. Data is used in a compelling way throughout the book.

Too often I finish reading an education-related book or article feeling deflated, I finished How It’s Being Done awed, inspired, and ready to get down to business. I wish It’s Being Done and How It’s Being Done were mandatory reading for anyone who’s given up on public education.

P.S. If you want a quick-hit, take a look at Chenoweth’s U.S. News & World Report article “Many Schools Find Ways to Close the Achievement Gap.”

A recent post on the Education Next blog by Paul E. Peterson caught my eye: “Will we have the best courses online in five years?” Peterson muses on the prediction, made a few years ago by Clay Christensen and Michael Horn in their must-read Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns), that half of all high school courses will be taken online by 2019.

However, my interest (and NewSchools’) is in what’s being referred to as “hybrid learning,” an emerging alternative to brick-and-mortar-only learning and to exclusively-online or “virtual” learning. This approach seems to combine the best of both worlds and holds substantial potential for transforming teaching and learning. The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) posits that most of the growth in the virtual learning space will be in the hybrid environment; early studies report that hybrid courses with some aspect of face-to-face communication lead to greater retention and stronger outcomes than purely online courses.

I am optimistic about the power of this innovation, but heeding Rick Hess’s advice on avoiding the false faith in “silver bullets” approach to technology innovation. (Check out Rick’s book Education Unbound for more sage advice.)

The timing of this reading is ironic, given that national policymakers are mostly on vacation: as Peterson notes, the need for a new policy framework is one of the most significant barriers facing hybrid and virtual schools. (His book, Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning expands on this idea and is also worth a read.) Establishing a new legal and regulatory environment that is conducive to success – in whatever form it takes, including offline, online, or a combination – could be hybrid schools’ most powerful disruptive contribution to education reform.

What are the innovations in preK-12 hybrid education that will accelerate the learning of students in underserved communities, in order to closing the college readiness and success gap in the next five years? I am desperately seeking any article, book, blog, case study, dissertation, PowerPoint presentation, research, video, etc. that provides actionable knowledge and promising practices. I invite your suggestions and recommendations.

The best book I have read in the past year has yet to be published, but will be out in October. It's written by an economist out of the University of Washington, and surprisingly it isn't by Dan Goldhaber but his colleague Dick Startz, who is at the mid-point of his career but is a newbie on education. You'd never guess it. Someone sent me a note suggesting I read a draft, and I begrudgingly agreed, only to be blown away by its content. It does an amazing job, making a well-articulated and -supported argument for why some teachers need to make a lot more money. He pulls together some research you've likely seen, but also some you probably haven't—and I've subsequently borrowed a lot of it for my own presentations. Put Profit of Education on your 2011 book list.

The most provocative article I read in the past year was actually by Dan Goldhaber (and his colleague Michael Hansen) entitled “Race, Gender and Teacher Testing: How Informative a Tool is Teacher Licensure Testing?” and published in American Educational Research Journal. They find that black teachers who scored lower than white teachers on their licensing tests were actually much more effective in the classroom (as measured by student growth on standardized tests) when assigned to teach black children. Though this is only one study, I do not feel that we are grappling appropriately with its implications. For our work, it presents real challenges, as we have always advocated for states raising the bar higher on licensing tests.

Let's see, I'm a fan of Heather Zavadsky's Bringing School Reform to Scale, a careful study of five award-winning urban districts. While I've argued time and again that it's a mistake to focus on leadership technique before structural challenges, I still think Liz City et al.'s Instructional Rounds in Education is a compelling and useful read. And I agree with Monty Neill that LDH's The Flat World and Education is worth reading-- whether or not one agrees with Linda on particulars and prescriptions.

Jim Ryan's new Five Miles Away, A World Apart is a piercing look at race, class, desegregation, and school reform in the heart of the old Confederacy. Torch Lytle's Working for Kids and Mike Sandler's Social Entrepeneurship in Education are two terrific first-person, anecdote-laden narratives by ornery reformers who've got great stories to tell (even if the titles leave something to be desired). And speaking of horrible titles, a fabulous read with an atrocious title is Checker Finn et al.'s Ohio's Education Reform Challenges-- which sounds like a municipal budget guide but is an eye-opening look at what it takes to push school reform on the ground.

When asked by grad students for some not-too-heavy summer reading, I typically recommend Cohen et al.'s The Shopping Mall High School, Sizer's Horace's Compromise, Henig's Rethinking School Choice, Katznelson and Weir's Schooling for All, Finn's Troublemaker, Kozol's Death at an Early Age (his only book I've actually liked), McAdams' Fighting for Our Kids...and Winning! (the working title was, delightfully, The Children Come Last), Kaestle's Pillars of the Republic, Bestor's Educational Wastelands, Peterson's marvelous School Politics, Chicago Style, and two always-relevant classics-- J.Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy and Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

I spent some time earlier this summer with Dr. James Comer, the venerable and venerated Yale Medical School professor who founded the Comer School Development Program in New Haven in 1968. The central idea of the approach, which would expand to 600 schools nationally, is that academic learning is inextricably linked to healthy development. So, Comer schools help kids manage their emotions, make good decisions, express themselves, solve problems, and think--even as they work on academics. After our visit, Dr. Comer sent me a copy of his 1998 book, "Maggie's American Dream: The Life and Times of a Black Family." It's a lovely, touching, compelling personal narrative, told partly by his mother and partly by himself. Raised in poverty, Comer and his three siblings earned 13 degrees among them and all achieved professional success. It's a powerful reminder of how families influence what happens to their kids--for good or ill. Comer drew on his own experiences growing up as well as developmental research in designing schools don't accept that kids from poor or dysfunctional families are doomed. Instead, they recognize what kids need to succeed and help them develop in a way that increases their chances.

Linda Darling Hammond's The Flat World and Education is valuable for, among other reasons, showing clearly that many nations have improved the quality and equity of their education systems without using large-scale, centralized (state or national) testing more than 3 times from entering school to leaving high school. (I summarized that and other evidence at http://www.fairtest.org/fact-sheet-multiple-measures-definition-and-exampl - but that is not a sufficient substitute for reading the book).

I am only part-way through Angela Engel's Seeds of Tomorrow: Solutions for Improving Our Children’s Education, an eloquent call for overhauling education to meet the needs of all children, rather than reducing schooling to test prep.

The Fourth Way by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley is an interesting evaluation of three previous waves of school reform since the 1970s, and a call for a fourth way. While the Obama-Duncan administration is mired in the past (the current status quo, this is a useful look at what education systems could become. I particularly appreciated discussions of 'lateral' assistance and community involvement.

Gerald Bracey's last book, Education Hell, is both a scathing indictment, backed up with strong evidence of the failure of the test-based status quo, but contains valuable historical information about the "Eight Year Study" which demonstrated positive benefits of progressive education.

I want to re-read Deborah Meier's The Power of Their Ideas and Seymour Sarason's The Predictable Failure of Education Reform. And on my desk also waiting for a read in the near future is Linda Nathan's The Hardest Questions Aren't On the Test: Lessons from an Innovative Urban School.

Lastly, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is a valuable analysis of the global economic and political policies that have emerged since the early 1970s, termed 'neoliberalism' by most of the world (following on 19th century British 'free market' policies), that provide the context and grounding to better understand the evolution and current dominance of the educational status quo of high-stakes testing and privatization.

I just finished a truly extraordinary book, “Schools Cannot Do It Alone” by Jamie Vollmer. A convert to public education, with the perspective of a successful businessman who once thought he knew best, Vollmer lays out the challenges public schools face, the transformation needed and some very real ways we must actually achieve the goal of excellence. His solutions are radical, sensible, and above all, doable. It’ll inspire you to act—whether you’re a parent, educator, policymaker or citizen who cares about the country.

(DISCLOSURE: I got a Kindle last year so my usual “book a week” pace has increased dramatically. Below is a list of what I’ve gone through since June 1.)

I bought 50 copies of Seth Godin’s Linchpin to give out to every high school kid I know. It’s the only deep and truly honest book I’m aware of that speaks to how we can thrive in this very new and very challenging economy of ours. Perfect for educators, too, but few that I’ve found seem interested in embracing the future of their profession—or trying to save it. This is not a book for people who hide under rocks but rather for those seeking to cast off the structures that may be limiting their opportunities, and step into the bright light of a new day. Kids, of course, have no choice but to embrace the future, and this is a book well worth their embrace. So give a copy of Linchpin to your favorite high school graduate today. You’ll be glad ya did.

I have also this summer enjoyed Godin's Tribes, and The Dip.

I spent a few hours with the Heath brothers once again.Their latest, Switch, provides a simple blueprint for serious change. I can't imagine any ed reformer not wanting to having this one handy.

Agile Software Development with Scrum is not about education at all, but it could be. It describes the world’s most effective methodology for software project management, and provides a perfect and easily translatable model for school-wide change. We have made no progress creating effective school change methodologies. Let’s stop trying and just adapt a methodology from another industry that already works, and that was created to solve exactly the same types of problems: chaotic, noisy, highly unpredictable systems with changing requirements and variable inputs that are resistant to long term planning, difficult to measure, and seemingly impossible to sustain. This book is about how to create entities that self-organize at the edge of chaos—and thrive as a result—just like our schools need to do.

You can’t beat Daniel Pink’s Drive if you want to understand how motivation works. His book is based largely on Deci & Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory. I’ve had great success over the years setting up classrooms and creating assessment systems based on SDT—easier differentiation, more accuracy in assessment, more student engagement, reduced teacher workload, and, yes, even higher test scores. Big wins all around. As with so much “good science” from scientists, D&R’s work runs smack in the face of testing, standards, and most of education reform. So the next time we all get excited about bringing “good science” to bear on education, let’s not forget that there’s a lot of “good science” in the field of science that we in education never even consider.

Reading in the Brain is Stanislas Dehaene’s extraordinary encore to his other neuro-educational opus, The Number Sense. If you want to understand the neurological basis of learning, there’s no one better person to learn it from than Dehaene. We often forget in education that mind and brain are two separate things and that to truly understand learning we must understanding the “cortical correlates” of skill and knowledge acquisition. Dehaene’s work, in both and math reading, takes a big spoon and digs down into all that electro-chemical pudding in our heads, and spells out how learning happens at its most fundamental levels.

Jason Fried’s Rework provides a shockingly refreshing view of the world of work from a guy who clearly has the results to show that he has mastered it. He’s not an organizational development guru or a sociologist. He’s a guy who gets a lot of work done. Now who do you wanna trust?

This article from Harvard Business Review shows us all which parts of reform are “off the rails” and tells us why. This blog post from Linchpin author, Seth Godin, speaks to the enormous cost of fear in public systems. Steven Pinker wrote a fine article for the New York Times on the hype surrounding the influence of mass media on human development. And while we’re on the subject of stuff on the web, I find myself reading and rereading Mr. Finn’s article on the state of education reform every few weeks. It has become something of an anthem for me as it so perfectly captures not just the reality of reform but the going-nowhere-fast feeling of reform as well for those of us working in the trenches.

Taking Charge of ADHD has been a good find. Recently, I needed to guide some folks in this area and had no formal background in it myself. This book is a little heavy for the average parent but not for the average parent with an ADHD kid. It’s packed with serious science and a lot of good, if not always practical, advice. It also recasts ADHD as having very little to do with lack of attention or increased hyperactivity and, more accurately, with impulse control and a developmental lag in the brain’s ability to perceive time. This thesis makes ADHD kids much easier to understand and to work with. It also explains the unintuitive truth of why stimulant medication is helpful to kids who already seem restless and fidgety.

The Black Swan is definitely worth a read if you’re interested in understanding how human beings make very bad decisions when faced with certain types of choices in complex systems. Mistakes were Made (But Not by Me) shows us all where we go wrong in attributing effects to their causes. Predictably Irrational and The Invisible Gorilla also show us simple ways we deceive ourselves. The errors in judgment that we make in interpreting education and educational data can be fund to have their origins in simple psychological concepts like "confirmation bias" and "fundamental attribution error". This suite of books covers “how” and “why” of where we go wrong and what we can do to go righter.

Well Being from the folks at Gallup has, I think, extraordinary implications for education reform. Too bad we're ignoring them. This is the best work ever done on what really matters in life. And if you take the time to crack the cover—or “boot it up” Kindle- or iPad-style—you’ll notice that very little of what we’re doing in schools today supports the future well-being of our children. I wish the CCSSI folks had read this book. Not sure what they could have done with it—except perhaps stop the project and start over from scratch (my personal preference!). If you believe as I do that school is not an end itself but a means to an end defined by greater levels of personal and societal well-being, this is a very important book for you to read. Sadly, the decisions we’re making today in schools are at odds with what our best social scientists tell us about what makes people happy, healthy, prosperous, and engaged in their communities.

Tribal Leadership is the single best book I’ve read in the last few years on leadership and organizational development. It is mostly about business but it has one amazing analysis in it regarding school—and how our steadfast insistence—codified by reform—that the 19th century factory model of schooling is somehow still appropriate for 21st century kids may have horrendous consequences for us socially and economically in the near future. The developmental model presented here shows us exactly where we are in our schools (not very far). You can see exactly where a school is on this model and what its leaders need to do to move it along. Best of all, the cure is as straightforward as the diagnosis.

Secrets of Mental Math is a simple book with simple tricks for helping kids become amazing rapid mental calculators. Since this form of mastery, attained early in a child's academic life, makes abstract subjects like Algebra easier to deal with—by reducing the number crunching load and freeing up brain cells for abstract concepts like variables and functions—I’m always wondering why mental math is never part of our curriculum, why it is so often ignored by standards organizations, and why I’m one of the only people ever teaching it. Could it be the fact that doing math in your head doesn’t require a math book or other costly “consumables?” Could a mental math revolution—which is just what we need in this country—threaten the economic interests of math publishers? And could economic interest be all that stands between our kids and STEM supremacy? Nah.

A Conflict of Visions explains the essential philosophical difference—and there is just one according to the book’s author—between liberal and conservative thinking. I read this one and it blew me away with the elegant simplicity of its thesis and the strength of its intellectual leverage. After that, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom made a lot more sense as did Paul Krugman’s The Conscience a Liberal. So I feel well-balanced now along the economic, social, and political spectra.

Stuart Buck’s Acting White is powerful and provides a reasonably original theory that can be said to at least partly explain the achievement gap. If you were around in the 1960s to remember desegregation, this is your book. But even if you were born in 1963, like me, you’ll still find it just as powerful. My big takeaway: little has changed. Buck quotes people from the 60s who lived through desegregation and whose grand children still attend our the local schools in the town where I currently live. I hear exactly the same comments about our schools today that folks were making a half century earlier. We are integrating but we are still not educating, and in some ways we are educating some people worse than ever.

Love and Hate in Jamestown tells the real story of the Jamestown colony. I read it because all the kids I work with think American history begins with the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock. When I them about Jamestown, they’re shocked. Their teachers swoon. The nurse must be called. And I get a nasty note of the head of the PTA about my being a communist or something. Truth be told, the kids love hearing stories they’ve never heard. And when I tell them about The Lost Colony and “Croatan”, they are even more mesmerized. US history is a crucible for transformational learning through critical thinking. As soon as kids find out that their country has been systematically suppressing its own history, they want to know the history even more—as well as the history of why it has been suppressed. Just wait till I show them how Pete Rose’s entire existence has been expunged from the baseball record book as though he never existed. History isn’t written by the winners, it’s written by controllers. Unlocking the truth about America stimulates something in kids that can rarely be accessed in any other way. As Ms. Ravtich showed us in her stunning book The Language Police, we must get away from textbook-based, state-board-of-education-controlled, bastardized, and bowdlerized US history. To my mind, this means giving up on content standards for history as such tools give states exactly the power no true American would want them to have—the ability to write, re-write, and suppress the very things we so desperately need our children to learn.

Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach is essential. I read it once very year, usually just before school starts, so I can reconnect with his intellectually and emotionally challenging wisdom about the real work of teaching. As teachers everywhere struggle with the essential challenge of reform, I will quote Parker’s invaluable thesis about the nature of individual freedom in the presence of top-down pressure to conform. Parker knows as well as anyone that a body divided against itself cannot stand: ‘“The courage to live divided no more, and to face the punishment that will follow, comes from this simple insight: no punishment anyone lays on you could possibly be worse the punishment you lay on yourself by conspiring in your own diminishment.” No single sentence in the English language has sustained me more in my work in education.

Not a book but still worth a look. Pop a copy of Kenton ’76 into your CD player, or just download two arrangements off this big band classic. Dave Barduhn’s arrangements of Send in the Clowns and My Funny Valentine are vintage Kenton. Dave was in high school—my high school—when he did the arrangements. What’s the point? Arts education in America has far outstripped "basic" education in terms of the quality of results it has given us and its growth during reform. Kids play instruments better than they used to, they create visual art better than they used to, and they perform theatrically better than they used to—by a long shot. And all without standards or tests or any of the things mainstream reformers seem to feel are so necessary. What do these “mere teachers” know that we politicians, policy wonks, and pundits do not? It’s simple: put people with actual skills and experience into classrooms and let them teach based not on contrived and reductive state curriculum guidelines but on the most current work of the world’s most talented professionals. This is not a trivial concept, ladies and gentleman, nor is it an aberration. All forms of Arts education have improved dramatically in the last 30 years while “academic education” has improved little. Best of all, the improvement in Arts has been voluntary, self-organizing, authentic, and sustainable.

The work of Arts teachers—and to some extent of athletics coaches as well—is the true model of reforming our system. People with talent and at least a modicum of real-life experinece in their discipline—musicians, actors artists, and coaches—use themselves and their experience as curricular models and then focus the attention of their students on the work of other talented professionals in the world within their domain. This is an amazingly simple and successful approach validated by generations of teachers, coaches, students, and players. Curiously, however, it is roundly ignored or rejected by educators and education policy experts in reading, writing, math, social studies, and science. The miracle of improvement we have seen nationwide in the Artis and in athlettics is truly market-driven and nudged along by the invisible hand of aspiration. It is relatively of free of politics, of ideology, and of pandering to interest groups. It requires no textbooks, no standards, and no tests. It’s all about helping kids develop real-world skills for the real world by studying the real world with people who’ve been in the real world.

Why can’t we see the simplicity of this solution in every other subject?

Whoops! Probably not the right question to be asking at this time in American education reform, so I think I’ll move along now. Enjoy the last weeks of your summer, y’all. And keep on reading.

The book i'm (finally) reading now and enjoying immensely is "The Corner," a 1997 nonfiction account of life on a rough corner in West Baltimore, written by the duo of Ed Burns and David Simon who would go on to create "The Wire" (which may be not only the best TV show ever but also the most engaging look at social dysfunction and urban education that I've ever seen). What does The Corner have to do with education, you may wonder? As in "The Wire," the characters go through the local education system, as parents or students or both, and pages 276-285 in particular contain some of the most powerful (and depressing) writing about urban education I've read in a long while. An example:

Cross-posted from This Week In Education.

Inasmuch as The Death and Life of the Great American School System reached the NY Times best-seller list and is still #1 on Amazon's list of books about education reform and education policy, I hope that everyone will read it and discuss the implications for current federal education policy.

Books I read and enjoyed this summer:

Michael Edwards: Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World

Barbara Torre Veltri, Learning on Other People's Kids: Becoming a Teach for America Teacher

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (a repeat, bears re-reading, watch for the Ahabs among us)

Diane Ravitch

Some great edtech books out this summer:

The World is Open, Curtis Bonk

DIY U, Kamenetz

Rethinking Edu in the age of Tech, Collins & Halverson

The LA TImes monumental analysis of the value-added of all intermediate LAUSD teachers will prove to be the most important article of the year.