From America's "most prominent school reformer" (LOS ANGELES TIMES) comes a stirring personal meditation on what works-and what doesn't-in our high schools today. Revisiting America's classrooms, Sizer assesses the changes over the past decade and a half - from school choice to interdisciplinary learning - that give us reason to be hopeful. Tracy Kidder has called this"an eloquent book."Based on years of visiting classrooms, Sizer identifies the fundamental compromises that cripple...

First published in 1984, this best-selling classic is Theodore Sizer's eloquent call to arms for school reform. In a new preface, Sizer addresses the encouraging movements afoot today for better schools, smaller classes, and fully educated students. Yet, while much has changed for the better in the classroom, much remains the same: rushed classes, mindless tests, overworked teachers. Sizer's insistence that we do more than just compromise for our children's educational futures resonates ju...

A plan for school reform that respects the best traditions of secondary schooling and urges us to do far more in preparing adolescents for the future.Sizer’s groundbreaking work offers a powerful new model for our schools, built on core principles:A Focus on Intellectual Habits: Moves beyond “covering content” to cultivate the essential habits of mind—perspective, analysis, and imagination—that prepare students for a complex world.Pe...

This engaging and important book is a critique of American education wrapped in a memoir. Drawing on his fifty years as teacher, principal, researcher, professor, and dean, Theodore R. Sizer identifies three crucial areas in which policy discussion about public education has been dangerously silent. He argues that we must break that silence and rethink how to educate our youth.Sizer discusses our failure to differentiate between teaching and learning, noting that formal schooling ...

Few writers ask us to question our fundamental assumptions about education as provocatively as Alfie Kohn. Time magazine has called him'perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades [and] test scores.' And the Washington Post says he is 'the most energetic and charismatic figure standing in the way of a major federal effort to make standardized curriculums and tests a fact of life in every U.S. school.'In this new collection of essa...

Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work -- but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, Bowling Alone*,* which The Economist hailed as "a prodigious achievement."Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans' changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures -- whether they be PTA, church,...

Expose the hidden mechanisms that turn curious children into compliant workers. John Taylor Gatto's explosive follow-up to Dumbing Us Down reveals the specific techniques schools use to destroy imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as rote memorization rather than creative discovery.The Weaponization of Education:This isn't conspiracy theory - it's documented history. Gatto traces how compul...

This shocking, surprisingly entertaining romp into the intellectual nether regions of today's underthirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a society of know-nothings.The Dumbest Generation is a dire report on the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its impact on American democracy and culture.For decades, concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down p...

The late Theodore Sizer's vision for a truly democratic public high school systemOur current high schools are ill-designed and inefficient. We have inherited a program of studies that in its overall structure has not changed in over a century. The question is What's next? Theodore Sizer, the founder of The Coalition of Essential Schools, was a passionate advocate for the American school system. In this, his last book, he offers a vision of what a future se...

A Clarion Call to Save America's Future by Empowering the Next GenerationIn The Vanishing American Adult, Senator Ben Sasse warns of an existential threat facing America. A generation of young people, raised by overprotective parents and coddled by misguided government programs, is ill-equipped to survive in today's highly-competitive global economy.Core coming-of-age experiences like learning the value of work, leaving home to start a family, and ...

“If you fear that cultural, political, and class differences are tearing America apart, read this important book.” —Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D., author of The Righteous MindWho will rule in the twenty-first century: allegedly more disciplined Asians, or allegedly more creative Westerners? Can women rocket up the corporate ladder without knocking off the men? How can poor kids get ahead when schools favor the rich?As our planet gets smaller, cultural conflicts ar...

Teaching the lessons of New York's most famous public school, Deborah Meier provides a widely acclaimed vision for the future of public education. With a new preface reflecting on the school's continuing success.