Recommended Reading List : Education

A must-read for parents, new teachers, and classroom veterans, Educating Esmé is the exuberant diary of Esmé Raji Codell's first year teaching in a Chicago public school. Heroine to thousands of parents and educators, Esmé now shares more of her ingenious and yet down-to-earth approaches to the classroom in a supplementary guide to help new teachers hit the ground running.

A MacArthur Fellow's revolutionary analysis of the role of race in the classroom.

This is an unforgettable tale--a captivating narrative that is as absorbing as fiction--about the power of a great teacher, but also about the legacy that remains long after the last note has faded into silence: lessons in resilience, excellence, and tough love. Strings Attached is for anyone indebted to a mentor and for those devoted to igniting excellence in others.

From one of America's most celebrated educators, an inspiring guide to transforming every child's education.

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.

In 1993, following a failed attempt to ascend K2, Greg Mortenson was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers in Pakistan and promised to build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time.

When Miss Barrett arrives at Calvin Coolidge High, fresh from earning literature degrees at Hunter College, she can hardly wait to shape young minds. Instead, she encounters broken windows, no supplies, students who would rather be anyplace else, and a stifling bureaucracy that makes her job more difficult at every turn.

Narrated through hilarious inter-office memos, students’ notes, and other scraps drawn from the waste basket, Up the Down Staircase stands as the seminal novel of the American public school system, a beleaguered institution perpetually redeemed by teachers who love to teach and students who long to be recognized.

Drawing on forty years of teaching and research, from primary school to adult education and workplace training, award-winning author Mike Rose reflects on questions related to public schooling in America.