Essential reading on US K-12 education

I’ve created an
Amazon Listmania! list with some terrific references on the US K-12 system.

These books are basically all critical of the public school system. I hope to find some more optimistic materials to round out the list.

Singapore education culture in U.S.? Not likely.

Singapore’s obsession holds lessons for us all (Andres Oppenheimer MiamiHerald.com): “”

The article suggestions that the academic success of Singaporeans is due to a culture that constantly and consistently promotes the value of education in society.

Such a culture is unlikely to take hold in the United States any time in the next cople of decades at least. The nation is much larger and more diverse than Singapore, and we have no deep-rooted culture of education boosterism. We should not look to the federal government, or even state governments, to promote the value of academic success in this country.

Any initiative to encourage learning and value education must start locally in the U.S. I suggest that public school districts, or individual schools, would be the right place to start.

Daniel Willingham: Reading Is Not a Skill

From The Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post

We tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way.

This style of teaching reading as a set of “strategies” is true even in the top-ranked school district in California. I suspect that it is true in many private schools as well. Parents are strongly encouraged to make sure that children read regularly at home, with explicit prescriptions for daily reading time and reading logs. The school makes no effort to recommend particular content, so parents are left with the job of ensuring that our children acquire sufficient background knowledge through reading at home that they can pass the routine classroom tests.

Certification Of Teachers as Painful Farce

Jay Mathews relates several examples where highly-qualified teachers are rejected by short-sighted bureaucrats for failure to meet extremely narrow criteria for qualification to teach in the public school system.