Best education books

A friend asked me the following:

When you get a chance I'm wondering if you would be willing to send out a list of your "top ten" books on education reform.  I read Work Hard. Be Nice. over the weekend.  I thought it was fabulous.  There were several books mentioned there, but as a passionate novice on education reform I'm looking for 9 or 10 more books like Work Hard. Be Nice.  I think everyone would probably benefit from knowing what else is out there.

Off the top of my head (I'm sure I'm going to catch a lot of flak for forgetting (or never having read) certain books):

1) It's not a book, but I think my powerpoint presentation, The Critical Need for Genuine School Reform -- And How to Achieve It, gives an excellent overview of the research and data, and some ideas about what works (and what doesn't).  It's posted at: www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/TheCriticalNeedforGenuineSchoolReform.pdf

 

2) Joe Williams's book, Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/140396839X/tilsoncapitalpar)

 

2) Jay Mathews, Escalante: The Best Teacher in America (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805004505/tilsoncapitalpar)

 

3) Wendy Kopp's book about TFA, One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph Of Teach For America And What I Learned Along The Way (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1586481797/tilsoncapitalpar)

 

4) The new book about TFA, Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307278239/tilsoncapitalpar)

 

5) Jay Greene, Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools--And Why It Isn't So (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/074254978X/tilsoncapitalpar)

 

6) Thernstroms, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/074326522X/tilsoncapitalpar)

After I sent this email, I received a few other recommendations:

A) I just finished reading Paul Tough's new book about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618569898/tilsoncapitalpar), which I really enjoyed.  In addition to telling a great story about the marvelous organization Canada has built, there's some fascinating research in it -- here's an excerpt, with a more lengthy excerpt at the end of this email:

AS JAMES HECKMAN HAS noted, there is considerable research that shows that this kind of early verbal skill can make a great and lasting difference in a child's life. In the mid-1980s, a handful of researchers in the science of reading identified a phenomenon they called the Matthew effect, named after a fairly un-Sermon-on-the-Mount-like verse from the Bible: "To every one who has, will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." What the researchers were trying to describe was a consistent rich-get-richer pattern that they had observed in the development of reading ability: with very few exceptions, good early readers become great readers, and limited early readers almost always wind up as poor readers. Late bloomers are, in fact, quite rare.

 

And in reading, as it turns out, the metaphorical rich overlap with the literal rich. Even as early as the beginning of kindergarten, children's level of ability with the printed word tends to correspond closely to the income level of their parents. As Susan B. Neuman, the education scholar, has reported, more than four out of five children at the highest socioeconomic level recognize the letters of the alphabet on the first day of kindergarten, compared to less than two of five children at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Half of all well-off kids can identify the beginning sounds of words when they start kindergarten, while just 10 percent of poor children can do the same.

 

And then after kindergarten, because of the Matthew effect, the disparities get even worse. The Matthew effect is a pretty commonsense phenomenon: Kids who are able to master "decoding," to grasp the strange fact that black marks on a page connect to sounds that you make with your mouth, and that those sounds and marks go together to convey information about, say, hopping on Pop—those kids think reading is fun. They do more of it. And the more they do, the easier it gets, and the easier it gets, the more they do. For children who have a harder time cracking the code early on, the opposite occurs, a grim process that one researcher calls "the devastating downward spiral." Those kids don't get the way letters go together, which means they can't figure out words they don't know, which means they never get to the stage where they're deriving actual meaning from the words on the page. They don't enjoy reading, so they don't do it unless they're forced to.

 

By middle school, the gap between avid readers and reluctant readers has grown into a chasm. If you rank fifth-grade students by how much time they spend reading on their own, outside of school, you find a huge range. A child at the ninetieth percentile --not the most book-crazy kid in class, but close to the top-will spend an average of twenty-one minutes a day reading, according to a 1988 study, which means that she goes through more than 1.8 million words a year. A child at the tenth percentile—not the most reading-averse kid in class, but close—will spend an average of six seconds a day on independent reading, which works out to just eight thousand words a year. Not surprisingly, the six-seconds-a-day kids don't catch up with the rest of the class. In fact, they just keep falling further and further behind.

B) I've started David Whitmans, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism (www.amazon.com/Sweating-Small-Stuff-Inner-City-Paternalism/dp/0615214088), but haven't had a chance to finish it.  I've heard great things about it.

 

C) Two recommendations from a friend:

I won’t quibble with any of the books on the list but I’d would suggest two others:

1.       John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets and America’s Schools:  (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0815714092/tilsoncapitalpar)

This classic gave the reform movement its intellectual credentials twenty years ago remains the best analysis of why reform is so important and so hard.  Readers will require more that a 15 minute attention span but for any serious reform-minded person it is worth the effort.

2.       Richard Rothstein, Class And Schools: Using Social, Economic, And Educational Reform To Close The Black-white Achievement Gap (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807745561/tilsoncapitalpar)

Reformers need to steel their conviction by listening seriously to the “opposition” rather than engaging only with those already singing from the same hymnal and Rothstein is the most cited opponent. But at the same time for those who bother to read the book, he is NOT NEARLY THE OPPONENT that those who cite him suggest! He never says “school reform doesn’t matter” but rather “it’s not the only thing that matters”.  And even most of us who think it is the single  MOST important thing don’t believe it is the only thing.

D) Three recommendations from another friend:

1. Paul Hill's books, Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America's Schools (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226336522/tilsoncapitalpar) and It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0815736398/tilsoncapitalpar), are important classics.  They were very important in forming the Gates agenda and creating a picture of system architecture.

Also, you'd need to round out a list with a Ted Sizer (Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618516069/tilsoncapitalpar), Horace's Hope: What Works for the American High School (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0395877547/tilsoncapitalpar) and The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807031216/tilsoncapitalpar)) and/or a Deborah Meier (Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807004596/tilsoncapitalpar), The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807031135/tilsoncapitalpar), In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807031518/tilsoncapitalpar) and Will Standards Save Public Education (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807004413/tilsoncapitalpar)) which all create a vivid picture of a challenging learning. 

And how about a book of poetry, Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0787969702/tilsoncapitalpar).  Great schools are full of passion as well as data. 

--------------------

 

Excerpt from Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618569898/tilsoncapitalpar)

 

AS JAMES HECKMAN HAS noted, there is considerable research that shows that this kind of early verbal skill can make a great and lasting difference in a child's life. In the mid-1980s, a handful of researchers in the science of reading identified a phenomenon they called the Matthew effect, named after a fairly un-Sermon-on-the-Mount-like verse from the Bible: "To every one who has, will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." What the researchers were trying to describe was a consistent rich-get-richer pattern that they had observed in the development of reading ability: with very few exceptions, good early readers become great readers, and limited early readers almost always wind up as poor readers. Late bloomers are, in fact, quite rare.

 

And in reading, as it turns out, the metaphorical rich overlap with the literal rich. Even as early as the beginning of kindergarten, children's level of ability with the printed word tends to correspond closely to the income level of their parents. As Susan B. Neuman, the education scholar, has reported, more than four out of five children at the highest socioeconomic level recognize the letters of the alphabet on the first day of kindergarten, compared to less than two of five children at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Half of all well-off kids can identify the beginning sounds of words when they start kindergarten, while just 10 percent of poor children can do the same.

 

And then after kindergarten, because of the Matthew effect, the disparities get even worse. The Matthew effect is a pretty commonsense phenomenon: Kids who are able to master "decoding," to grasp the strange fact that black marks on a page connect to sounds that you make with your mouth, and that those sounds and marks go together to convey information about, say, hopping on Pop—those kids think reading is fun. They do more of it. And the more they do, the easier it gets, and the easier it gets, the more they do. For children who have a harder time cracking the code early on, the opposite occurs, a grim process that one researcher calls "the devastating downward spiral." Those kids don't get the way letters go together, which means they can't figure out words they don't know, which means they never get to the stage where they're deriving actual meaning from the words on the page. They don't enjoy reading, so they don't do it unless they're forced to.

 

By middle school, the gap between avid readers and reluctant readers has grown into a chasm. If you rank fifth-grade students by how much time they spend reading on their own, outside of school, you find a huge range. A child at the ninetieth percentile --not the most book-crazy kid in class, but close to the top-will spend an average of twenty-one minutes a day reading, according to a 1988 study, which means that she goes through more than 1.8 million words a year. A child at the tenth percentile—not the most reading-averse kid in class, but close—will spend an average of six seconds a day on independent reading, which works out to just eight thousand words a year. Not surprisingly, the six-seconds-a-day kids don't catch up with the rest of the class. In fact, they just keep falling further and further behind.

 

Joseph Torgesen, a researcher at the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University, has studied attempts to reverse the spiral, and his conclusions are relevant not only to the efforts taking place in Harlem Gems, but to the struggles at Promise Academy middle school as well. In a study published in 2004, Torgesen looked at a dozen or so experimental studies of intensive reading interventions done in different parts of the country and targeted at different ages. When he analyzed the interventions aimed at nine- to twelve-year-old struggling readers, he found results that were mixed at best. With enough time and work, it seemed, it was possible to push these middle school-aged kids forward on the reading basics, like decoding, accuracy, and word comprehension. But the news was much more discouraging when it came to "fluency"— the ability to read with ease. Despite the fact that the middle school students in the studies were given as much as one hundred hours of one-on-one or small-group instruction, they made very little progress in fluency. Torgesen's conclusion: by the end of elementary school, "if children's impairments in word-reading ability have reached moderate or severe levels,' catching kids up may simply be impossible.

 

But when Torgesen looked at early interventions with delayed readers—in first and second grade—his mood brightened. He cited dire statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the annual survey known as "the nation's report card," which showed that 37 percent of American fourth-graders had "below basic" reading skills, meaning they were significantly de layed. But, he said, new research had made it possible to envision a very different picture. "Once, this was inevitable, but no more," he wrote. "We now have the knowledge and the tools to bring this       ` percentage down to a single digit." Torgesen examined six different studies, all intensive interventions aimed at accelerating first- and second-grade children who were at a reading level far below that of their classmates. The results were striking, and the implications were nothing short of stunning. The interventions were remarkably effective; each one brought at least half of the targeted students up to an average level of reading ability by the end of the grade, and in one study, 92 percent of them hit that level. According to Torgesen's calculations, if these early interventions were applied to delayed readers nationwide, at least four-fifths of the current population of problem readers—a disproportionate number of whom are poor and minorities—would move into the average ability range. Their reading problems would simply disappear.

 

The difference between the interventions that worked and the ones that didn't was as plain as day, according to Torgesen. Start early, the way Monica Lucente was doing with the Harlem Gems, and you can accomplish almost anything; start late, the way the reading teachers at Promise Academy middle school were trying to do, and it gets harder and harder to make an impact.

 

MORE THAN ANY other kind of intervention in the lives of low-income children, intensive prekindergarten programs have an impressive track record. In her book Changing the Odds, Susan Neuman describes one of the best and most thoroughly documented: Bright Beginnings, a pre-K program in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, school district, which an ambitious new superintendent named Eric Smith introduced in 1997. Bright Beginnings is intended for the kids who are furthest behind; it is open to the four-year-olds in the city who score the lowest on a screening test of cognitive ability. The program has a disproportionate number of African American students and poor students. The thirty-one hundred children who are now enrolled get six and a half hours a day of instruction, focused on literacy skills. Each classroom of eighteen or nineteen students is led by a certified teacher and a teacher's assistant. Parents are enlisted in the effort to help their children read; at the beginning of the school year, they sign a "learning compact" that commits them to read at least one hundred books with their child at home during the year.

 

The total cost per child per year was $5,391 in 2002 — less than Harlem Gems, but more than most pre-K programs —and the results are quite promising. After a year of Bright Beginnings, students not only score higher on a "kindergarten entry profile" test than a demographically similar control group; remarkably, they also beat the average for the city as a whole, despite the fact that low cognitive scores were a prerequisite for inclusion in the program. In just a single year, in other words, the worst-performing four-year-olds in Charlotte are able to erase their deficit altogether.

 

After a year of kindergarten, the scores for the Bright Beginnings students slip a bit, though they are still elevated; 72 percent of kids in the 2002 Bright Beginnings class were on grade level at the end of kindergarten, compared to 79 percent of non–Bright Beginnings kids. As they continued to make their way through elementary school, though, their scores continued to slide, and by third grade, 6o percent were on grade level, compared to 75 percent of non–Bright Beginnings students. There was still some encouraging news in those numbers —the control group, made up of students who were eligible for the program but didn't participate, had only 52 percent of students on grade level by third grade —but they showed disturbing evidence of the notorious fade-out effect.

 

Smith had paid for Bright Beginnings by taking almost all of the federal funding his district received for poor children — so-called Title I money—and putting it into the prekindergarten program. (Most superintendents try to spread the funding out over the length of a child's school career.) In many ways, Smith's strategy worked very well. The enriched environment that he was able to create for the district's most disadvantaged four-year-olds gave them a huge lift. But as those students returned to regular public school, and the enrichment ended, some of the benefits wore off— and at that point, there weren't resources available to help the low-income students hang on to or build on their gains.

 

A similar pattern is evident in the data from the Perry Preschool program. In the course of the two-year program, the participants' average IQ shot up from 8o to 96, but by the fifth grade, it was back down to 85, about the same level as the control group. In his writing, James Heckman uses that statistic to demonstrate how powerful noncognitive abilities can be—his point is that even after the IQ bump faded, the Perry children still went onto have more successful lives than their peers. But the fade-out effect is nonetheless a disturbing phenomenon, and one that leads to an intriguing set of questions: What would happen if a program like Perry or Bright Beginnings never ended? What if that same kind of support and intervention lasted for years?

 

That was exactly the question that Canada had set out to answer with the conveyor belt. And he would soon, get the first indication of how well his new invention might work. In the fall of 2007, the first Promise Academy kindergarten class, the students chosen at the lottery in April 2004, would be going into third grade, where . they would take their first statewide reading and math test. About a third of the class were Harlem Gems graduates, and a lot of them had gone through Baby College too, and so for many of the kids, it would be their fifth straight year of academic enrichment. It would be a moment of truth: If the third-grade scores looked like average Harlem scores, then Canada's conveyor belt wasn't working. But if they looked like average American scores, then Canada would have the first concrete evidence that he might be onto something; that he might finally have found the right strategy and the right tools not just to close the gap between poor kids and middle-class kids, but to keep it closed.