Books on Our Current Educational System
Teaching Sucks - But We Love it Anyway! A Little Insight into the Profession You Think You
Know
Frank Stepnowski
2013
4.9 stars/38 reviews
not in the library
The Fire Rises. And it is time for the voices of teachers to be heard. "I find it fascinating, and a bit
insulting," confides Frank Stepnowski, the iconoclastic author of Why Are All the Good Teachers Crazy
and S.C.R.E.W.E.D., An Educational Fairytale, "that so many people feel so enabled to criticize teachers.
Folks get their homes repaired multiple times, but they don't automatically think they could be
construction workers, plumbers, etc. People and their family members undergo surgeries and visit
hospitals, but they don't instantly assume they could be doctors. I could go on and on and yet, because
they went to school, or have children in school, legions of people feel like they know what it is to be a
teacher. They're wrong; and the evidence is in both the children they send us, and the fact that they stand
idle, ignorant to so many "educational" decisions being made about our children that could irreversibly
damage future generations." Teaching Sucks - But We Love It is an unapologetic retaliation to those that
would blame teachers exclusively for the ills that plague modern education, a wake-up call to the
uninformed masses, and a love letter to those good teachers that continue to fight the good fight in the
face of nearly insurmountable odds, in a nation that seems to increasingly devalue their importance.
SCREWED: An Educational Fairytale
Frank Stepnowski
2011
4.8 stars/42 reviews
not in the library
The year is 2012 and the President has passed The Absentee Parent Act, suddenly making parents
accountable for the academic and moral shortcomings of their offspring! Legal guardians everywhere turn
to the places that have been raising their children for years - the schools. Alas, our current educational
system is a farce, a fact suddenly of great concern to the soon to be punished parental population.
Meanwhile, in a New Jersey classroom, a frustrated teacher has an epiphany, and soon T.E.A.M. (Trust in
our Extreme Alternative Methodology) schools begin to spread across the country, providing the kind of
common sense instruction, uncompromising discipline, and political incorrectness that other schools wish
they could employ. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, and an army of antagonists line up to
challenge this Brave New School; but Frank Stepnowski, aka: Captain America, and his dedicated band
of teachers will not go quietly! The battle lines are drawn, and comedic chaos ensues. With a delightfully
demented cast and enough metaphoric mayhem to power a bulldozer aimed at the educational status quo,
S.C.R.E.W.E.D. is another perfect storm of fury, fun, and foreshadowing from the gloriously twisted
mind that gave you "Why Are All the Good Teachers Crazy?"
Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public
Schools
Diane Ravitch
2013
4.6 stars/280 reviews
5 copies in the library
From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, former U.S. assistant secretary of
education, “whistle-blower extraordinaire” comes an incisive, comprehensive look at today’s American
school system that argues against those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but
reasoned call to stop the privatization movement that is draining students and funding from our public
schools. In Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch argues that the crisis in American education is not a crisis of
academic achievement but a concerted effort to destroy public schools in this country. She makes clear
that, contrary to the claims being made, public school test scores and graduation rates are the highest
they’ve ever been, and dropout rates are at their lowest point. She argues that federal programs such as
George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top set unreasonable targets
for American students, punish schools, and result in teachers being fired if their students
underperform, unfairly branding those educators as failures. She warns that major foundations, individual
billionaires, and Wall Street hedge fund managers are encouraging the privatization of public education,
some for idealistic reasons, others for profit. Many who work with equity funds are eyeing public
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Books on Our Current Educational System
education as an emerging market for investors. Reign of Error begins where The Death and Life of the
Great American School System left off, providing a deeper argument against privatization and for public
education, and in a chapter-by-chapter breakdown, putting forth a plan for what can be done to
preserve and improve it. She makes clear what is right about U.S. education, how policy makers are
failing to address the root causes of educational failure, and how we can fix it. Public school education is
essential to our democracy, and its aim, since the founding of this country, has been to educate citizens
who will help carry democracy into the future.
Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The Shocking Truth from the Front Lines of American Public
Education
John Owens
2013
4.6 stars/53 reviews
4 copies in the library
An explosive new look at the pressures on today's teachers and the pitfalls of school reform, Confessions
of a Bad Teacher presents a passionate appeal to save public schools, before it's too late. When John
Owens left a lucrative job to teach English at a public school in New York City's South Bronx, he thought
he could do some good. Faced with a flood of struggling students, Owens devised ingenious ways to
engage every last one. But as his students began to thrive under his tutelage, Owens found himself
increasingly mired in a broken educational system, driven by broken statistics, finances, and
administrations undermining their own support system-the teachers. The situation has gotten to the point
where the phrase "Bad Teacher" is almost interchangeable with "Teacher." And Owens found himself
labeled just that when the methods he saw inspiring his students didn't meet the reform mandates.
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are
Undermining Education
Diane Ravitch
2011
4.5 stars/118 reviews
7 copies in the library
A passionate plea to preserve and renew public education, The Death and Life of the Great American
School System is a radical change of heart from one of America's best-known education experts.
Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education and a leader in the drive to create a national
curriculum, examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions that she once staunchly
advocated. Drawing on over forty years of research and experience, Ravitch critiques today's most
popular ideas for restructuring schools, including privatization, standardized testing, punitive
accountability, and the feckless multiplication of charter schools. She shows conclusively why the
business model is not an appropriate way to improve schools. Using examples from major cities like New
York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, and San Diego, Ravitch makes the case that public education today
is in peril. Ravitch includes clear prescriptions for improving America's schools: leave decisions about
schools to educators, not politicians or businessmen; devise a truly national curriculum that sets out what
children in every grade should be learning; expect charter schools to educate the kids who need help the
most, not to compete with public schools; pay teachers a fair wage for their work, not merit pay based on
deeply flawed and unreliable test scores ;encourage family involvement in education from an early age
The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way
Amanda Ripley
2014
4.5 stars/343 reviews
13 copies in the library
How do other countries create “smarter” kids? What is it like to be a child in the world’s new education
superpowers? In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and
solve problems they’ve never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the
modern economy. Inspired to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist
Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embedded in these countries for one year. Kim, fifteen, raises
$10,000 so she can move from Oklahoma to Finland; Eric, eighteen, trades his high-achieving Minnesota
suburb for a booming city in South Korea; and Tom, seventeen, leaves a historic Pennsylvania village for
Poland. Through these young informants, Ripley meets battle-scarred reformers, sleep-deprived zombie
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Books on Our Current Educational System
students, and a teacher who earns $4 million a year. Their stories, along with groundbreaking research
into learning in other cultures, reveal a pattern of startling transformation: none of these countries had
many “smart” kids a few decades ago. Things had changed. Teaching had become more rigorous; parents
had focused on things that mattered; and children had bought into the promise of education.
Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
William Deresiewicz
2014
4.2 stars/38 reviews
6 copies in the library
As a professor at Yale, Bill Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. His students, some of
the nation’s brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and
creatively, and how to find a sense of purpose. Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure
conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the
skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools
shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics and computer science, students are
losing the ability to think in innovative ways. Deresiewicz explains how college should be a time for selfdiscovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success, so they can forge their
own path. He addresses parents, students, educators, and anyone who's interested in the direction of
American society, featuring quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the
years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and clearly presenting solutions.
The Teacher Wars
Dana Goldstein
2014
4.1 stars/19 reviews
not in the library
In her groundbreaking history of 175 years of American, Dana Goldstein finds answers in the past to the
controversies that plague our public schools today. Teaching is a wildly contentious profession in
America, one attacked and admired in equal measure. In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and
unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been similarly
embattled for nearly two centuries. From the genteel founding of the common schools movement in the
nineteenth century to the violent inner-city teacher strikes of the 1960s and '70s, from the dispatching of
Northeastern women to frontier schoolhouses to the founding of Teach for America on the Princeton
University campus in 1989, Goldstein shows that the same issues have continued to bedevil us: Who
should teach? What should be taught? Who should be held accountable for how our children learn? She
uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that
recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores,
ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have
been tried in the past without producing widespread change.
Wasting Minds: Why Our Education System is Failing and What We Can Do About It
Ronald A Wolk
2011
not in the library
Why has successful school reform been so difficult to achieve, despite decades of well-intentioned efforts,
endless rhetoric, and billions of dollars of investment? Why do most U.S. schools continue to produce
disappointing results? Why is there such a disconnect between the schools we need and the schools we
have? In this thoughtful and insightful book, Ronald A. Wolk tackles these questions head-on, identifying
key assumptions that have shaped the debate on school reform for the past several decades, including the
emphasis on standards and testing, calls for a longer school day and year, the push to enroll more students
in advanced math classes, and the quest to place a highly qualified teacher in every classroom. Backed by
research and other evidence, he points out the flaws in each assumption, and then proposes alternative
assumptions as the basis for new, innovative schools that would emphasize such elements as:
individualized instruction, with various pathways for learning; real-world contexts for learning,
performance assessment, a restructuring of public education to expand preschool, and transformation of
the teachers' role from instructor to advisor.
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