Here are 38 books that How the Other Half Learns fans have personally recommended if you like
How the Other Half Learns.
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I’m an economist fascinated by the ways that early opportunities shape lifelong success. My interests go way back to the big public schools I attended in Southern California, where I watched some kids benefit from tutoring, counseling, coaching, and other private resources that most kids couldn’t access. I went on to get a PhD in economics, then taught at Brown University and advised Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign on child development policy. After years of research and teaching – and becoming a dad myself – I wrote The Parent Trap to expose the monumental challenges facing so many parents and the solutions most likely to make a difference.
As a writer, I admire this book as a great work of creative nonfiction. The book uses captivating stories and research to make a deep point with bipartisan appeal. Yes, “character” matters. That impulse to exert effort, that strength to persevere through challenges, that discipline and self-control, and patience – all the stuff that many people especially on the Right celebrate as “personal responsibility” can and does drive success. But where does “character” come from? Mostly it doesn’t come from individual choices or innate endowments determined at birth. It comes from environmental influences – opportunities and safeguards we provide for children’s development – and that many people especially on the Left try to provide through public policy. If entire demographic groups appear more likely to lack “character,” that reflects our shared collective refusal to make character-building opportunities more widely accessible.
Why character, confidence, and curiosity are more important to your child's success than academic results. The New York Times bestseller. For all fans of Oliver James or Steve Biddulph's Raising Boys, Raising Girls, and The Complete Secrets of Happy Children.
In a world where academic success can seem all-important in deciding our children's success in adult life, Paul Tough sees things very differently.
Instead of fixating on grades and exams, he argues that we, as parents, should be paying more attention to our children's characters.
Inner resilience, a sense of curiosity, the hidden power of confidence - these are the…
I am an anthropologist and studied homelessness in Paris and London for the last decade. I was drawn into the world of people on the streets when I moved to London and started observing their parallel world. I spent almost a year with people on the street in London and two years in Paris. I volunteered in day centers, safe injection facilities, and soup kitchens and slept in a homeless shelter. Since I finished my first book on my observations in Paris, I have advised both policymakers on homelessness and written countless journalistic articles. My goal is always to provide a clearer picture of homelessness through the eyes of the people themselves.
I met Matthew Desmond before he became one of the youngest Professors with his own center at Princeton University. He was visiting London, had just published his first book, and was still finishing the research for this book.
Desmond did an enormous amount of field research; he spent months living in a trailer park, on top of thousands of hours in archives and courtrooms where eviction cases are decided. The result is the best book I have ever read about poverty.
What happens when ‘normal people’ get evicted? Desmond’s story is rich and personal, and that is what we need: we need to understand the lives of poor people better in order to finally decide that we must change the systems that put them there.
*WINNER OF THE 2017 PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION* 'Beautifully written, thought-provoking, and unforgettable ... If you want a good understanding of how the issues that cause poverty are intertwined, you should read this book' Bill Gates, Best Books of 2017
Arleen spends nearly all her money on rent but is kicked out with her kids in Milwaukee's coldest winter for years. Doreen's home is so filthy her family call it 'the rat hole'. Lamar, a wheelchair-bound ex-soldier, tries to work his way out of debt for his boys. Scott, a nurse turned addict, lives in a gutted-out trailer. This is…
I’m the author of two published novels and dozens of short stories, essays, and memoirs. I write about education, crime, and public safety, and I work to improve educational and career opportunities for young people in New York and other cities.
Bratton became New York City police commissioner in the early 1990s when there were more than 2,000 homicides a year. His reforms, including the widely copied CompStat program for pinpointing where crimes were occurring, and then concentrating policing to prevent those crimes, helped bring about a huge decline in crime. This often self-congratulatory memoir is nevertheless full of insights into how to improve policing and make cities safer and more livable.
"Engaging. . . a remarkably candid account. . . Succeeding as a centrist in public life these days can be an almost impossible task. But centrism in law enforcement may be the most delicate challenge of all. Bratton's ability to practice it was a startling phenomenon." -New York Times Book Review
The epic, transformative career of Bill Bratton, legendary police commissioner and police reformer, in Boston, Los Angeles, and New York
When Bill Bratton became a Boston street cop after his return from serving in Vietnam, he was dismayed by the corrupt old guard, and it is fair to say…
I’m the author of two published novels and dozens of short stories, essays, and memoirs. I write about education, crime, and public safety, and I work to improve educational and career opportunities for young people in New York and other cities.
Is our criminal justice system too harsh or too lenient on crime? To answer this question, Barry Latzer, retired professor at John Jay, offers both facts and historical perspective in his history of punishment since colonial days. Latzer does not gloss over the historic racism and cruelty of policing in the U.S. but shows that today most people in prison are actually there for committing violent crimes, and that the new technology of “e-carceration” can further reduce prison populations while improving public safety.
Justice is on trial in the United States. From police to prisons, the justice system is accused of overpunishing. It is said that too many Americans are abused by the police, arrested, jailed, and imprisoned. But the denunciations are overblown. The data indicates, contrary to the critics, that we don’t imprison too many, nor do we overpunish. This becomes evident when we examine the crimes of prisoners and the actual time served. The history of punishment in the United States, discussed in vivid detail, reveals that the treatment of offenders has become progressively more lenient. Corporal punishment is no more.…
I attended school for fourteen years, experiencing a wide range of different school types, from an experimental child-centred school in Washington DC to a Steiner school in rural Wiltshire to an all-girls’ comprehensive school in Bath. I hated school and my teachers and peers frequently hated me. In revenge, I became a historian of childhood and education in modern Britain so I could try and work out why school was so bad, and why children and teenagers are not listened to in British society. I did my PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and am now an Academic Track Fellow in History at Newcastle University.
As Cunningham and Lavalette argue, there have been school strikes in Britain for as long as there have been schools.
This fascinating popular history is the only book I know of that tells the story of these strikes from the ‘children’s rebellion’ that kicked off in Scotland in the 1880s to the mass walkouts in 2003 to protest against war in Iraq. (I, too, marched against this war as a sixteen-year-old.)
It shows that the same arguments have always been used against student strikers: they are just ‘bunking off’, copying adults, or controlled by more powerful forces. But young people have led their own movements over and over again, recognising that schools are their workplaces, and refusing to go to them is an effective way to protest.
Young people, we are told, are totally disengaged from political debate. True, distrust of the Westminster political game has alienated many. But as soon as an opportunity arises to effect real change - whether that's the independence referendum in Scotland or Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour Party leader - young people have engaged, enthusiastically and in numbers.In late 2010 young students left their schools and sixth form colleges to join mass demonstrations against cuts and student fees. In much of the press they were dismissed as truants, easily led and unthinking. But, whenever they were given a chance, young students…
I’m a cognitive scientist, and I love reading, thinking, and researching about the nature of the human – and especially the young – mind, and what it is capable of. Even while I was still doing my PhD in experimental psychology at Oxford in the early 1970s, I was gripped by the new possibilities for thinking about education that were being opened up by science. In particular, the assumption of a close association between intelligence and intellect was being profoundly challenged, and I could see that there was so much more that education could be, and increasing needed to be, than filling kids’ heads with pockets of dusty knowledge and the ability to knock out small essays and routine calculations. In particular, we now know that learning itself is not a simple reflection of IQ, but is a complex craft that draws on a number of acquired habits that are capable of being systematically cultivated in school – if we have a mind to do it.
Ron Berger is a global treasure in the field of education. He is the guiding spirit behind the remarkable EL Education schools – they used to be called Expeditionary Learning schools – in the USA. An Ethic of Excellence was the first book of Ron’s I encountered, and it blew me away. With years of hard-won experience, he has learned that all students, give the right kind of support, are capable of producing genuinely high-quality work, and he knows how to teach in a way that makes that possibility a reality. Ron says, “when we are grown up, we won’t be judged by our test scores, but by the quality of both our character and our work”, and he gets students ready for that world. His schools get all their students to good colleges, and they get good degrees. The quality of Ron’s work is truly inspiring.
Drawing from his own remarkable experience as a veteran classroom teacher (still in the classroom), Ron Berger gives us a vision of educational reform that transcends standards, curriculum, and instructional strategies. He argues for a paradigm shifta schoolwide embrace of an ethic of excellence. A master carpenter as well as a gifted teacher, Berger is guided by a craftsman's passion for quality, describing what's possible when teachers, students, and parents commit to nothing less than the best. But Berger's not just idealistic, he's realistiche tells exactly how this can be done, from the blackboard to the blacktop to the school…
My writing career has been organized around the old-school journalistic mission to ‘afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted.’ Often, I take on big targets that other journalists have missed—a case in point being Bill Gates. News outlets have published thousands of one-sided stories about Gates’s philanthropic goals and gifts but seldom interrogate the Gates Foundation for what it is: an unaccountable, undemocratic structure of power. My investigation of Bill Gates, of course, stands on the shoulders of giants. The five books I recommend here paved the way for me to break new ground, expand the story, and hopefully spark a bigger public debate.
The first book written about the Gates Foundation brilliantly unpacks the foundation’s serial, wrong-headed interventions in public education. Written by school teacher Anthony Cody in clear language with compelling argumentation, the book gives voice to the Gates Foundation’s intended beneficiaries: the teachers who say that Bill Gates’s charitable crusade is hurting, not helping, American schools.
Can a teacher challenge the wealthiest man in the world? This is the question Garn Press asked in 2014 when Anthony Cody’s The Educator And The Oligarch was first published. The answer is a resounding “Yes!”
Anthony Cody not only challenged Bill Gates, but also received the 2015 NCTE George Orwell Award, which recognizes writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse, and the 2015 eLIT Silver Medal Award in the education/ academic/ teaching category.
In recognition of the importance of Anthony’s steadfast resistance to Gates’ unacceptable manipulation of public education policies, Garn Press just…
Anna Wang was born and raised in Beijing, China, and immigrated to Canada in her 40s. She received her BA from Beijing University and is a full-time bilingual writer. She has published ten books in Chinese. These include two short story collections, two essay collections, four novels, and two translations. Her first book in English, a 2019 memoir, Inconvenient Memories, recounts her experience and observation of the Tiananmen Square Protest in 1989 from the perspective of a member of the emerging middle-class. The book won an Independent Press Award in the "Cultural and Social Issues" category in 2020. She writes extensively about China. Her articles appeared in Newsweek, Vancouver Sun, Ms. Magazine, LA Review of Books China Channel, Ricepaper Magazine, whatsonweibo.com, etc.
This book deals with the new challenge brought by the Chinese education system. As an American journalist dispatched to Shanghai, Chu chose an unconventional way of educating her son by enrolling him in an elite state-run public school instead of an international school. This memoir delineates her navigating inside China's high-achieving yet somewhat insular education system. When the Chinese use military-like high-pressured techniques to educate their students and "out-educate" the Americans, people couldn’t help but wonder if the Chinese educational philosophy could teach the world a lesson or two. Chu discovered that the Chinese system was designed to weed out the incompetent, and as a result, every student who successfully entered higher education was a fighter and survivor. Educational practices reveal the core value of a society. Chu raises an important question in an increasingly flattened world as to how to raise American kids to compete globally.
'I couldn't put this book down. Whip smart, hilariously funny and shocking. A must-read' Amy Chua, Yale Law Professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
In 2009, Lenora Chu, her husband Rob, and toddler Rainey, moved from LA to the Chinese megacity Shanghai. The US economy was spinning circles, while China seemed to be eating the planet's economic lunch. What's more, Shanghai teenagers were top in the world at maths, reading and science. China was not only muscling the rest of the world onto the sidelines, but it was also out-educating the West.
I always assumed that one day I would become a teacher. Yet, it was only by a circuitous route that I ended up focusing on education, taught at a Graduate School of Education, and was a founding member of Project Zero, a major education research center. In my book, I present the major ideas and programs with which I’ve been involved. (In a companion volume I present my “essential writings” on the Mind). While I am best known for developing the “theory of multiple intelligences,” I believe that this book provides a full portrait of my contributions.
A small group of scholars and educators have taken the ideas of progressive education seriously and made them available to ambitious and adventurous educators worldwide.
In his explanations of why Finland has become among the most admired systems in the world, with three editions of this “instant classic,” Sahlberg has provided an important and timely model for progressive educators worldwide.
The first two editions of Finnish Lessons described how a small Nordic nation built a school system that provided access to a world-class education for all of its young people. Now available in 30 languages, this Grawemeyer Award-winning book continues to influence education policies and school practices around the globe. In this Third Edition, Pasi Sahlberg updates the story of how Finland sustains its exemplary educational performance, including how it responds to turbulent changes at home and throughout the world. Finnish Lessons 3.0 includes important new material about:
teachers and teacher education
teaching children with special needs
the role of…
I was born a bookworm. As a kid, I’d read daily—for hours and with wild abandon—across authors and genres. But I always had a special love of British classics: Shakespeare, Forster, the Brontës, tales featuring lords, ladies, and English heroes like the Scarlet Pimpernel. When I first encountered Jane Austen, I was a high-school freshman. Her writing forever changed my perspective and, thus, my life. I went on to devour all of her books, and later, to study her work for a summer at Oxford University. I visited her old haunts, too, like Bath and Chawton, and remain charmed by her stories and inspired by her when I write my novels.
I fell for Baroness Orczy’s dashing fictional hero—the Scarlet Pimpernel—after watching the 1982 film by the same name starring Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour. I then went on to read the entire book series he was based on! It wasn’t until I came across Lauren Willig’s charming Pink Carnation series, which pays homage to clever and elusive British spies like the Scarlet Pimpernel, that I found a new historical spy hero to delight in. I loved the modern-day protagonist Eloise Kelly, who’s in present-day England working on her dissertation, as well as her historical counterpart Amy Balcourt, who leads the fascinating and romantic parallel story in this very enjoyable dual narrative novel.
Nothing ever goes right for Eloise. The day she wears her new suede Jimmy Choos, it rains. When the Tube stops too quickly, she's the one thrown into some stranger's lap. And she's had her share of misfortune in the way of love. So, after deciding that romantic heroes must be a thing of the past, Eloise is ready for a fresh start but first she must finish her history dissertation on those most romantic of spies, the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian. While rummaging through a pile of old letters and diaries, Eloise discovers something amazing, something that…
