I’m partway through Paul Tough’s new book, How Children Succeed. In his first book, Whatever It Takes, most readers focused on Tough’s portrayal of the Harlem Children’s Zone. What I noticed as an historian of education was his intellectual history of the culture-of-poverty arguments–a nice long chunk I would like most graduate students in the [...]
Over on her blog, Rebecca Onion distills her tweeps’ recommendations for readings on (mostly college) teaching, and her list includes classics from McKeachie’s Teaching Tips to Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do. I like almost everything on the list a great deal, but I would not recommend that a teaching assistant (or faculty member) [...]
Florida has released some data on high school graduation rates, using the new federal definition that requires high schools to be responsible for dropouts who immediately enroll in GED programs (previously, those dropouts were deleted from the state’s official longitudinal rate which had been following 9th graders through graduation or attrition). This data provide an [...]
In the past year, for diversion I’ve read some books intended for a general audience written by psychologists–several of my department colleagues would find these watered down from research journals, but I can justify the brain candy: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow Antonio Demasi, Self Comes to Mind Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, [...]
Two new books I saw at the History of Education Society meeting in Chicago and strongly recommend on a topic I began my career with: Russell Rumberger, Dropping Out (Harvard University Press, 2011). This is the definitive summary of research on the subject. It is depressing at times, but if you care about the subject, [...]
ISSN 1936-6701, "Sherman Dorn: Work to understand how schools have been social institutions" by Sherman Dorn, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. A work at www.shermandorn.com.
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