Prof's Choice

Teaching, learning, and transformations.

ROBERT REICH '68, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for the 21st Century (A.A.Knopf, 1991)—Probably the best analysis of the economic needs of a global economy and the ways in which the educational system has to change to meet them.

GARRET KEIZER, NO Place ButHere: A Teacher's Vocation ina Rural Community (Viking, 1988) A set of elegantly simple essays on what it means to be a teacher and a student, by an English teacher in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.

THEODORE SIZER, Horace'sCompromise: The Dilemmaof the American High School (Houghton-Mifflin, 1984) Sizer throws into high relief the glaring inadequacies and frustrations in American schools today. After the book's call for transformative reform received wide praise, Sizer created the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national reform organization that attempts to recreate schools around teaching and learning rather than bureaucracy. In Horace'sSchools: Redesigning the AmericanHigh School (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), Sizer gives a fictionalized narrative of one school's approach to the transformation process.

SEYMOUR SARASON, The Predictable Failure of EducationalReform: Can We Change CourseBefore It's Too Late? (Jossey-Bass, 1990)—A brilliant and scathing analysis of the structural barriers to school reform.

ROLAND S. BARTH, Improving Schools from Within:Teachers, Parents, And PrincipalsCan Make the Difference oossey- Bass, 1990)—A practitioner's account written for parents and teachers about how schools can be changed in fundamental ways.