TeacherJay's EduBlog

Ralph Tyler presented a model of curriculum design in 1949 that is still the foundation of many designs used today.

The latest book by Peg Tyre, The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do takes a long-deserved look at the way that male students are falling further and further behind their female counterparts.  For the last few decades there has been [...]

Warren Bennis’ 1989 book, On Becoming a Leader, was revised and expanded for a 2003 edition (the links provided are now for the 2009 edition). In this classic, Bennis outlines some of the key characteristics that are common to leaders in all fields. He draws these conclusions from many interviews and biographies of past and present [...]

Jonathan Kozol’s 2005 book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America , looks at the issue of racial integration in the nation’s schools. Over 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and forcing the integration of America’s schools, we [...]

It is fascinating to read about events such as the American Revolution in a French textbook … 1) History becomes compartmentalized into an abstract string of facts that is not relevant to the world in which we live today. 2) It fosters a seperationist attitude in American students which will become increasingly damaging as the world grows more and more globally connected … So what should be done about this?

Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan B. Scovronick teamed up to show the ways in which the public education system advances, but also hinders, the ability to pursue the “American Dream”, in their 2003 book The American Dream and the Public Schools.  After first coming up with a definition of what the American dream is, they explore what [...]

Neil Postman, the NYU professor perhaps most known for his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, originally published in 1985, on the pervasive manner of television into our lives and our ways of communicating had previously written a book exploring the concept of childhood. The Disappearance of Childhood was [...]

As an editor of the New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough is also a leading author on the issues of poverty, education, and the achievement gap. This new book takes a look at the idea Geoffrey Canada, the President and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone, has for improving the success rates of African-American students, who, [...]

Although this book is now a bit dated, its effect on the reader is not diminished. Kozol takes a look at the stark differences that are experienced by students in the public schools in the United States. Visiting schools in some of the poorest and wealthiest districts in the nation, Kozol speaks with students, parents, [...]