How do you judge the quality of a school, a district, a teacher, a student? By the test scores, of course. Yet for all the talk, what educational tests can and can’t tell you, and how scores can be misunderstood and misused, remains a mystery to most. The complexities of testing are routinely ignored, either because they are unrecognized, or because they may be—well, complicated.Inspired by a popular Harvard course for students without an extensive mathematics background, Measu...

For decades we've been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there's still little consensus on what works, and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on, however, is that schools need to be held accountable—we need to know whether what they're doing is actually working. But what does that mean in practice?High-stakes tests. Lots of them. And that has become a major problem. Daniel Koretz, one of the nation's...

Finalist for the 2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the YearBest business book of the week from Inc.comThe author of Power, Stanford business school professor, and a leading management thinker offers a hard-hitting dissection of the leadership industry and ways to make workplaces and careers work better.The leadership enterprise is enormous, with billions of dollars, thousands of books, and hundreds of thousands of blogs and talks focused on improvin...

Why are group decisions so hard?Since the beginning of human history, people have made decisions in groups—first in families and villages, and now as part of companies, governments, school boards, religious organizations, or any one of countless other groups. And having more than one person to help decide is good because the group benefits from the collective knowledge of all of its members, and this results in better decisions. Right?Back to reality. We’ve...

When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In Blind Spots, leading business ethicists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel examine the ways we overestimate our ability to do what is right and how we act unethically without meaning to. From the collapse of Enron and corruption in the tobacco industry, to sales of the defective Ford Pinto, the downfall of Bernard Madoff, and the Cha...

Two top business professors offer up "the best research and advice on negotiation" (Chip Heath)Do you know what you want? How can you make sure you get it? Or rather, how can you convince others to give it to you? Almost every interaction involves negotiation, yet we often miss the cues that would allow us to make the most of these exchanges. In Getting (More of) What You Want, Margaret Neale and Thomas Lys draw on the latest advances in psychology and beh...

With four simple truths as his framework, Charles Murray, the bestselling coauthor of The Bell Curve, sweeps away the hypocrisy, wishful thinking, and upside-down priorities that grip America’s educational establishment.Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn academic material. Doing our best for every child requires, above all else, that we embrace that simplest of truths. America’s educational system does its best to ignore it.Half of the childr...

Two of the most respected voices in education and a team of young education scholars identify 50 myths and lies that threaten America's public schools. With hard-hitting information and a touch of comic relief, Berliner, Glass, and their Associates separate fact from fiction in this comprehensive look at modern education reform. They explain how the mythical failure of public education has been created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that stand to gain fro...

"[The anti-testing] movement now has a guidebook. . . . Kamenetz shows how fundamentally American it would be to move toward a more holistic system." -- New York Times Book ReviewThe Test is an essential and critically acclaimed book for any parent confounded by our national obsession with standardized testing. It recounts the shocking history and tempestuous politics of testing and borrows strategies from fields as diverse as games, neuroscience,...

Swans, Swine, and Swindlers addresses a core, contemporary question: What steps can we take to better anticipate and manage mega-crises, such as Haiti, Katrina, and 9/11?This book explores the concept of "messes." A mess is a web of complex and dynamically interacting, ill-defined, and/or wicked problems; their solutions; and our conscious and unconscious assumptions, beliefs, emotions, and values. The roots of messes can be classified as Swans (the inability to s...

Something nasty is happening in America. Have you noticed the trend? There’s more bullying, more incivility, more disrespect and even more relationship violence between us at home, at work, in our communities and in the news. And, it seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. We have noticed a pattern to this behavior that is all too familiar: Personal Attacks, Crisis Emotions, All-or-Nothing Solutions, Narcissistic Behavior and Negative Advocates. We are well-acquainted with this patt...

Excellence Through Equity is an inspiring look at how real-world educators are creating schools where all students are able to thrive. In these schools, educators understand that equity is not about treating all children the same. They are deeply committed to ensuring that each student receives what he or she individually needs to develop their full potential and succeed.To help educators with what can at times be a difficult and challenging journey, Blankstein and Noguera...