Almost every major American city is experimenting with school choice—a deeply controversial idea that is dramatically reshaping public education. Will the wider array of school options help parents and educators identify better strategies for helping all children learn? Or will the high stakes of the marketplace end up privatizing this most public of institutions? Education activist Sam Chaltain believes that before we can answer these questions, we must put a human face on the moder...

What are the First Amendment rights? How do you resolve questions about the rights of students, educators, and parents in a school setting?The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the most basic and cherished rights of society--religion, speech, press, petition, and assembly. Anyone who wants to know more about those freedoms in the context of schools will find The First Amendment in Schools a rich resource for study and application. The book includes*...

In American Schools, Sam Chaltain interweaves the leading ideas from the education, business, and scientific communities to outline a framework for leadership that helps educators and organizational leaders create the optimal conditions for transformational change. By pairing a rich theoretical framework with the stories of communities that have, over several years, tried to create more democratic learning communities, Chaltain does what any reader of this book will have to do - p...

Inspirational stories of engaging, real-life educational experiencesEveryone has a personal learning story, a time when they became actively engaged in their own education. Maybe it was an especially challenging teacher, or a uniquely supportive environment, or a collaborative classroom. In Faces of Learning, both well-known public figures, such as Arne Duncan and Al Franken, and ordinary Americans recall the moments when they truly learned something....

In a stinging dissent to a 1961 Supreme Court decision that allowed the Illinois state bar to deny admission to prospective lawyers if they refused to answer political questions, Justice Hugo Black closed with the memorable line, "We must not be afraid to be free." Black saw the First Amendment as the foundation of American freedom--the guarantor of all other Constitutional rights. Yet since free speech is by nature unruly, people fear it. The impulse to curb or limit it has been a constan...

A powerful, persuasive, thought-provoking vision for how to finish the long struggle for equality between men and women, work and familyWhen Anne-Marie Slaughter accepted her dream job as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life in suburban New Jersey. Her husband and two young sons encouraged her...

"A rich, much-needed remedy for the standardized institutions that comprise too much of our school system today… ideal for teachers and parents intent on resurrecting and fostering students' inherent drive to learn…An essential resource."-Daniel H. Pink, author of DRIVE and A WHOLE NEW MIND“Schools that Learn is a magnificent, grand book that pays equal attention to the small and the big picture - and what's more integrates them. There is no book on educatio...

Marc Freedman, hailed by theNew York Timesas "the voice of aging baby boomers [seeking] meaningful and sustaining work later in life," makes an impassioned call to accept the decades opening up between midlife and anything approximating old age for what they really are -- an entirely new stage of life, which he dubs the encore years.In The Big Shift, Freedman bemoans the fact that the discussion about longer lives in America has been entirely abou...

The authors of Make Just One Change argue that formulating one’s own questions is “the single most essential skill for learning”—and one that should be taught to all students.They also argue that it should be taught in the simplest way possible. Drawing on twenty years of experience, the authors present the Question Formulation Technique, a concise and powerful protocol that enables learners to produce their own questions, improve their questions, and stra...

Despite the best efforts of educators, our nation's schools are dangerously obsolete. Instead of teaching students to be critical thinkers and problem-solvers, we are asking them to memorize facts for multiple choice tests. This problem isn't limited to low-income school districts: even our top schools aren't teaching or testing the skills that matter most in the global knowledge economy. Our teens leave school equipped to work only in the kinds of jobs that are fast disappearing from the ...

An educational innovator who worked at Sesame Workshop and The George Lucas Educational Foundation offers a new vision for learningAs a result of constant innovation, learning is no longer limited by traditional confines and we're moving beyond students tied to their chairs, desks, and textbooks-and teachers locked away in classrooms. In Education Nation author Milton Chen draws from extensive experience in media-from his work on Sesame Street in its nasce...

“A mind-expanding and heart-opening book” (Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence) that reveals the value of everyday interactions with people in our communities – and what we lose without them.Our barista, our mechanic, our coworker—they populate our days, but we often take them for granted. Yet these are the people who bring novelty and information into our lives, allow us to exercise different parts of ourselves, and open us up to new opportuniti...