Summer Reading suggestions from Diane Ravitch

Prolific education writer, Diane Ravitch, shares her reading interests this summer and suggests a few...for you. She and Deborah Meier co-author the blog Bridging Differences where they disagree with one another - while respecting each other's passion for strong schools.

I am trying to start a new book, so I am reading quite a lot of books about the business model in education and also books about American business. The classic in this genre is Raymond Raymond Callahan's "Education and the Cult of Efficiency.

I am currently reading Larry Cuban's "The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can't Be Businesses."

If you want to learn more about the issues that Deborah and I have been debating, you can read our books. For example, Deborah Meier's "The Power of Their Ideas" or my book, "Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform."

Then there's Richard Hofstadter's 1962 classic "Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life.

E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s "The Knowledge Deficit." This book does a fine job of explaining why children's achievement tails off between fourth grade and eighth grade.

And two books from the wonderful Jeanne Chall: "Learning to Read: The Great Debate" and "The Academic Achievement Challenge." If every educator read Chall's book on reading, there would be no more reading wars. Similarly, her last book, which was published shortly after her death, sums up everything she had learned about the research on achievement. Everything she wrote was leavened by her wisdom and common sense.