Derek Black, Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy (2020)

This book is a stunning history of an idea. Black, a professor of constitutional law, presents the history of an idea first articulated in the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, threatened again and again throughout our nation’s history but persistently revived and reanimated: that a system of public education is the one institution most essential for our democratic society. And, while the specific language defining a public education as each child’s fundamental right is absent from the U.S. Constitution, the guarantee of that right is embedded in the nation’s other founding documents, in the history of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, in the second Reconstruction during the Civil Rights Movement, and in every one of the state constitutions. Black continues, exploring how the idea of public education is faring right now a decade after the collapse of public school funding during the Great Recession and after years of growing school privatization.  Jan Resseger reviews the book here and here.

Daniel Koretz, The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better (2017)

A Harvard University testing expert shows how our system of high-stakes, test-based school accountability distorts the education process, distorts the evaluation of schools, and exacerbates inequity between the public schools in wealthy communities and the public schools which serve our nation’s poorest children.

Eve Ewing, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (2018)

How did it happen that over 80 percent of the 50 school closures in Chicago, the product of accountability based school reform, were located in African American communities?  Students did not do better after students were transferred to receiving schools, and many neighborhoods grieved for the loss of the institutions which had anchored their neighborhoods.

Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: the Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2012)

Diane Ravitch summarizes and explains the failure of test-and-punish school reform as prescribed in the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top.

David Berliner and Gene Glass, 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools” The Real Crisis in Education (2014)

This book is a poignant and topical critique of the ideology of test-and-punish school accountability.

Mike Rose, Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us (2014)

As Rose explains in the preface, “Why School? Comes from a professional lifetime in classrooms, creating and running educational programs, teaching and researching, writing and thinking about education and human development… We’ve narrowed the purpose of schooling to economic competitiveness, our kids becoming economic indicators. And we’ve reduced our definition of human development and achievement… to a test score.”