BOOKS WE RECOMMEND READING

The Coolest School in America: How Small Learning Communities are Changing Everything
by Ronald J. Newell, Ed.D.

This book's title was the reaction of Tom Vander Ark, the executive director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Education Initiatives. When he visited the New Country Charter School in Henderson, Minnesota in the mid '90s, he said that it was "the coolest school he had seen of all the schools he had visited throughout America." Ron Newell, one of the founders of the Minnesota New Country School and co-founder of the EdVisions Cooperative, which operates the school, picked up on what Tom said and collaborated with Doug Thomas, the other founder of EdVisions, and Walter Enloe, a professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, to write this informative book that depicts a unique teaching and learning style that is gaining popularity across the country.

Teachers As Owners: A Key to Revitalizing Public Education
by Edward J. Dirkswager and Ted Kolderie

What if teachers were owners, not employees? Teacher-ownership is a revolutionary way to put excitement and meaning back into the teaching profession and to revitalize public education. This book demonstrates how being an owner rather than an employee can give teachers control of their professional activity, including full responsibility and accountability for creating and sustaining high performing learning communities.

Passion For Learning: How a Project-Based System Meets the Needs of High School Students in the 21st Century
by Ronald J. Newell, Ed.D.

In explaining a project-based learning system, Dr. Newell writes,“There is a way to have students participate in adult-like behaviors in conjunction with a well-designed project. The key lies primarily in the development of the learner as an intrinsically motivated person. The family-like atmosphere created by advisory groups, the personal workstations, the idea of allowing learners to construct projects around their passions and interests connected to state standards, are designed into the system to create an intrinsically motivated learner who will operate in an accountable mode. Not because they are told to, but because they see the need for acting adult-like. And they have been allowed to be in a more natural learning environment, one similar to the real, authentic world of work. Connect this with the right to design their own projects around their interests and perceived needs, and you have allowed for the development of the passionate learner, one who is learning to create their own path to adulthood.”

Authentic Achievement: Restructuring Schools for Intellectual Quality
by Fred M. Newman and Associates

This book presents the findings of a five-year, federally funded study that examined the connection between school restructuring and student achievement. Using a wealth of examples, the authors provide a vivid picture of the conditions under which innovations in a school's organization contribute to achievement. They recommend standards for reaching student intellectual quality and offer evidence of how these standards work.

How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
by David Bornsteir

This book tells the stories of social entrepreneurs from all over the world. Their accounts tell of the affect people can have on social change if they are committed, have a vision and persist until they have transformed an entire system.

The $100,000 Teacher
by Brian Crosby

For parents, educators and policymakers — an explosive new look at public education in America that focuses on treating good teachers like the experienced professionals they are and eliminating the incompetents.

"Cheating Our Kids shines a light on the distressing, sometimes darkly comic reality of American Education. In uncompromising prose rich while anecdote, Joe Williams explain how politics, sweetheart deals, overgrown bureaucracy, union contracts, and incompetence hinder our schools and what parents can do about it." -- Frederick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Chris Whittle is the founder of Edison Schools, the largest for-profit education management organizations (EMO) in the U.S. serving more than 270,000 students in twenty states and two countries. Crash Course is packed with suggested innovations, and a vision of how the schools of the future should and will be different.

Steven Wilson is the founder and former CEO of Advantage Schools, which was one of the leading EMOs in America before its investors sold the company in 2001. Learning on the Job looks back on the first decade of the EMO experiment and reveals the academic, financial, logistical, and political records of seven leading EMOs, and discusses the potential and the pitfalls of their educational and business models.

Our School tells the story of Downtown College Prep, a charter high school in San Jose that recruits underachieving students and promises to prepare them for four-year colleges and universities.

Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
by James C. Collins & Jerry I. Porras

Built to Last identifies 18 "visionary" companies and sets out to determine what's special about them. The "stories" related in this book can be used as analogies when connected to the question, "How can our public schools be improved?"

Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
by Jim Collins

Using tough benchmarks, the author and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. Again, the examples used in this book can be related to public education.

His Excellency: George Washington
by Joseph J. Ellis

Drawing from the newly catalogued Washington papers at the University of Virginia, Joseph Ellis paints a full portrait of George Washington's life and career -- from his military years through his two terms as president.

Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow

Building on biographies by Richard Brookhiser and Willard Sterne Randall, Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton provides what may be the most comprehensive modern examination of the often overlooked Founding Father.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond

In everyday language, Professor Diamond writes of the ecological collapse and subsequent decline of past societies and correlates their demise with present day societies including our own.

Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
by Lester R. Brown

As stated in the book's preface, "Plan A, business-as-usual, has the world on an environmental path that is leading toward economic decline and eventual collapse. If our goal is to sustain economic progress, we have no choice other than move onto a new path—Plan B." This book is a sequel to Brown's 2003 book Plan B and describes in further detail how we can move toward a sustainable society. It can be downloaded, chapter by chapter, from Earth Policy Institute's Web site by clicking here.

Make the Impossible Possible
by Bill Strickland with Vince Rause

This book chronicles one man's crusade to inspire others to dream bigger and achieve the extraordinary. MacArthur "genius" award winner Bill Strickland was an aimless kid growing up in a rough Pittsburgh neighborhood when a ceramics teacher at his high school took him under his wing and introduced him to the power of the arts and education. Determined to use the arts to help others, Strickland returned to his neighborhood after college and established Manchester Bidwell, two training centers dedicated to giving troubled kids and disadvantaged adults the encouragement and training to transform their lives.

All of the above books can be purchased at most popular book stores or on-line through the several Internet sites that sell books such as Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.