This week Jack Schneider of K-12 Schools Beyond the Rhetoric and guest blogger Ethan Hutt compiled two book lists focusing on education reform and standardized testing and measurement. At BookMarks, we thought it was worth pointing to the lists, each of which includes five books well-suited to educators, parents, policymakers, and others interested in the current politics of education. Keep these titles in mind for your summer reading list.
On Monday, Schneider blogged about five books on education reform in his post “Summer Reading List: Why Reform Fails.” He reviews Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, by David Tyack and Larry Cuban; So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools, by Charles M. Payne; Teaching and Its Predicaments, by David K. Cohen; Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch; and Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott. Schneider also mentions his own book, Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools as “extra credit” reading.
Ethan Hutt, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland, followed up on Tuesday with “Reading List: The History of Testing and Measurement.” For folks concerned about how education policy is shaped by test data and results, he recommends reading The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould; Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History, by William J. Reese; Merit: The History of a Founding Ideal from the American Revolution to the Twenty-First Century, by Joseph F. Kett; Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, by Theodore M. Porter; and The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public, by Sarah E. Igo.
What’s on your professional development reading list this summer?