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Teaching and Learning in Japan. Thomas Rohlen and Gerald LeTendre. Drawing on ethnographic and experimental studies, this book gives the reader an inside view of Japanese teaching methods in elementary classrooms. A far cry from western notions of an emphasis on rote learning and strict discipline, Japanese classrooms emphasize the process of learning and encourage individuality in their students. The book also explores interesting aspects of Japanese culture, such as Zen meditation and noh drama. |
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Ivory Tower Blues: A university system in crisis. James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar. This book provides a very frank report on the situation in modern Canadian universities, principally with reference to the problems of grade inflation and its consequences. In response to an increasing number of high school students arriving with increasingly inflated marks, the universities have responded by watering down their courses and inflating their own grades. |
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The Last Normal Child: Essays on the intersection of kids, culture, and psychiatric drugs. Lawrence W. Diller. This book presents the viewpoint of a pediatrician who specializes in children with learning and behaviour problems. Although the author sometimes prescribes stimulants like Ritalin, he strongly prefers to begin by trying behavioural and educational interventions, such as encouraging parents and teachers to use more structured responses to bad behaviour. |
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End of Ignorance: Multiplying our human potential. John Mighton. The author, a Toronto mathematician and playwright, diplomatically but devastatingly demolishes the constructivist approach used in most Canadian public schools to teach math. Drawing on new research in brain development, Dr. Mighton calls for a re-examination of the assumptions which underlie current teaching.
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It`s Being Done: Academic success in unexpected schools. Karin Chenoweth. This book proves that even disadvantaged immigrant children can be taught to a high level, profiling 15 American schools that are doing exactly that. The author shows that an unyielding belief in the ability of all children - regardless of background - to excel at the highest levels, combined with a relentless commitment to excellent instruction, can transform people's lives. |
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The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science. Norman Doidge. Only a few decades ago, scientists considered the brain to be fixed or
“hard-wired” and considered most forms of brain damage, therefore, to be incurable. Dr. Doidge, an eminent psychiatrist and researcher, was struck by how his patients' own transformation belied this, and set out to explore the new science of neuroplasticity by interviewing both scientific pioneers in neuroscience and patients who have benefited from neuro-rehabilitation. (Review by Oliver Sacks) |
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The War Against Hope: How teachers' unions hurt children, hinder teachers, and endanger public education. Rod Paige. According to the author, a former US secretary of education, the biggest impediment to meaningful school reform is the enormous, self-aggrandizing power wielded by the teacher' unions. Although the teacher' unions profess to be on the side of the teachers (and of the students), they are in fact acting in their own best interests - even when those interests conflict with the welfare of classroom teachers and students. |
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Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get out the shovel - why everything you know is wrong. John Stossel. A fun read, this book describes many popularly-held beliefs on a variety of topics, including parenting, health, business, and government. Of particular interest is the chapter entitled "Stupid Schools". As with other areas of the book, the format is to state a "myth" and follow it with a "truth" counterpoint. Regular readers of the SQE Forum will be familiar with many of these education myths but will enjoy the way the author lays out his counter-arguments. (Review by Nancy Wagner) |
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Let's Kill Dick and Jane: How the Open Court Publishing Company Fought the Culture of American Education. Harold Henderson. Educational reforms come and go, yet public schools preserve their pervasive and almost invisible culture. Nothing much is going to change until their anti-intellectural, activity-oriented bias changes. This book tells the story of the Open Court Publishing Company which for 34 years sold research-based elementary math and reading textbooks in an effort to combat the culture and bring about real school reform. |
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Myths and Misconceptions about Teaching: What Really Happens in the Classroom. Vicki E. Snider. The author identifies six teaching myths that are particularly harmful for low-performing students (those with disabilities or risk factors). The six myths are: the myth of process which emphasizes what occurs during instruction and de-emphasizes what happens as a result of instruction; the myth of fun which requires instruction to be entertaining; the myth of eclectic instruction which prevents teachers from using the best approach for a particular lesson; the myth of the good teacher which discourages teachers from trying to improve their techniques; the myth of learning style which expects teachers to teach all of their students differently; and the myth of disability which refers to the low expectations conferred on certain students. |
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The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. In his latest book, Dr. Hirsch once more tackles the disastrous effect of the current "content-neutral, skills-oriented concept of education" on students, especially disadvantaged students. He explains that modern teaching approaches not only fail to help low-income students catch up to their more privileged peers, but actually cause them to fall even further behind. Dr. Hirsch deplores the unfairness of this process, and points out that it has negative consequences in terms of social cohesion, democracy, and the health of the economy. As well, the widening spread in academic preparation contributes to teacher dissatisfaction and student boredom. |
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Order from VAS Pty. Ltd., Box 388, Kingston, Tasmania, Australia 7050
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Reading Through Tears. Byron Harrison and Jean Clyde. This book comes from Australia. The authors are reading tutors who use systematic phonics, succeeding in teaching 100% of their students to read. The data reported in this book are based on their study of more than 3000 children. Out of their clinical practice has come the Visual Attention Span (VAS) Theory. VAS is the number of letters that can be held in short-term memory and, as children mature, their VAS increases. The more letters a student can hold in his or her short term memory, the better he or she will fare with whole language/balanced literacy methods (which involve a lot of memorization). Since boys mature more slowly than girls, boys tend to have lower VAS scores and do worse at reading in whole language/balanced literacy classrooms. But in systematic phonics classrooms, where children are required to process sounds as opposed to memorizing letters, VAS is not a factor and there is no gender gap. |
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For the Love of Words: Vocabulary Instruction that Works. Diane E. Paynter, Elena Bodrova, and Jane K. Doty. Many students have vocabularies far below what is necessary for them to do well at school. This book offers teachers a practical and systematic instructional framework for helping their low-vocabulary students close the gap. There are chapters on such things as direct instruction of new vocabulary words, planning for incidental learning, creating a customized list, deciding when and how to introduce new words, and assessing students' progress. The book includes a list of essential words by grade level. |
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Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley. This is the very interesting story of two young researchers who wandered why, despite the best efforts of early childhood educators, low-income children were still lagging behind in school. Knowing that the dramatically-larger vocabularies of high-income children are one of the main reasons for their academic success, the researchers expected to find big differences in the quality of the experiences and language to which the children had been exposed. However, it turned out that by far the biggest difference was simply the amount of talking - the number of words children were exposed to hour after hour. A secondary factor was the far greater amount of encouragement and affirmation that high-income children received from their parents. |
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Educating Citizens: International Perspectives on Civic Values and School Choice. Patrick J. Wolf and Stephen Macedo. This book contains a collection of essays that examine whether school choice promotes religious and social fragmentation and the erosion of civic values. Looking at the extensive school choice programs in the Netherlands, England and Wales, Belgium, Canada, Germany, France, and Italy, the more or less unanimous conclusion may be summed up as follows. The measurable effects of recent school choice policies on academic achievement, on civic virtue, and on integration and educational equity have been modest, but they have been in almost every case positive. |
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Doomed to Fail: The Built-In Defects of American Education
. Paul A. Zoch. This book zeroes in on an aspect of child-centred learning that may not have occurred to many people. Because the child-centred philosophy calls for learning to be easy and fun, students are freed from the need to work hard to meet high standards. In child-centred classrooms, the primary responsibility for learning falls on teachers, not on students. In some cases, the teachers work harder for the students' success than the students themselves do. |
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Exceptional Children - Ordinary Schools: Getting the Education You Want for your Special Needs Child.
Norm Forman. This book was written by a Toronto psychologist who makes his living helping parents advocate for their special-needs kids in publicly-funded schools. The author outlines an advocacy campaign that would impress General Norman Schwartzkopf: creating a master file, knowing your rights, and so on. However, the author never admits the possibility that even the best advocacy can fail to achieve a satisfactory outcome - a depressingly common state of affairs. |
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The War Against Grammar.
. David Mulroy. The author, a professor of classics, disagrees with the establishment view that the teaching of traditional grammar is a waste of time. Arguing that a solid grounding in the grammatical analysis of sentences is necessary for the development of good writing and speaking skills, both in one's native tongue and in foreign languages, the author attributes students' inability to write in complete sentences, not to mention logical paragraphs, to their lack of foundation in basic grammar. |
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Hold on to your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers.
Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté. The authors hypothesize that young children have a hard-wired survival-related instinct to become attached to others. But many features of modern society are conspiring to hijack the attachment from healthy bonding to parents to unhealthy bonding with peers. Some of the results of this lost orientation of children toward nurturing adults are troubled and rebellious children, bullies, the practice of medicating kids, and general alienation on the part of today's young people. |
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Order from C.D. Howe Institute
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Signposts of Success: Interpreting Ontario's Elementary School Test Scores.
David Johnson. The author ranks most Ontario publicly-funded elementary schools on the basis of their students' results on provincial testing. Dr. Johnson, a professor of economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, finds that high scores at schools in wealthy neighbourhoods do not necessarily mean that these schools are providing a superior service. Some schools with less affluent and less well-educated parents have high achievement results, and some schools with affluent, well-educated parents have results that are not especially good given their school community. |
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What America Can Learn from School Choice in Other Countries.
David Salisbury and James Tooley, eds. This book examines the school choice policies of a number of countries, including Chile, Australia, and several European countries. The article on Canada, by Claudia Hepburn of the Fraser Institute, provides a useful overview of the range of policies among the provinces and the associated outcomes. |
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Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools - And Why It Isn't So.
Jay P. Greene. Dr. Greene examines 18 widely-held beliefs about education and finds they just aren't true. Some examples of these untrue myths are: schools perform poorly because they need more money; small classes would produce big improvements; certified or more experienced teachers are substantially more effective; and school choice harms public schools. |
2004 |
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Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America's Schools.
Herbert J. Walberg and Joseph L. Bast. This book applies basic economic principles to education reform. It isolates eight root causes of the poor performance of government (public) schools: lack of competition; ineffectual school boards; union opposition to reform; conflicts of interest; political interference; lack of standards; centralized control and funding; and anti-academic classroom incentives. |
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Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing.
Richard P. Phelps. This book demolishes the myths and half-truths circulated by the critics of standardized testing. While acknowledging that standardized testing has its flaws and will never be perfect, the author deplores the fog of unreasonable criticisms that obscures the legitimate criticisms and renders policy-makers' jobs very difficult and confusing. |
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Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to get your Children the Education They Need.
William G. Ouchi. The author, an expert on organization and management, examined innovative decentralized school systems in Edmonton, Seattle and Houston. He found that decentralized systems consistently outperform centralized systems. Dr. Ouchi identifies seven keys to success: every principal is an entrepreneur; every school controls its own budget; everyone is accountable for student performance and for budgets; everyone delegates authority to those below; there is a burning focus on student achievement; every school is a community of learners; and families have real choices among a variety of unique schools.
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Public Education as a Business: Real Costs and Accountability.
Myron Lieberman. This book discusses a number of hidden costs to public education, for example: depreciation expenses; deferred maintenance; non-levied property taxes; parental fund-raising; parent-paid remedial and enrichment education; corporate donations; schools in Native reservations, military bases, and correctional institutions; subsidized teacher training; remedial education in post-secondary institutions and workplaces; and the administrative costs of collecting education taxes. |
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Growing a Reader from Birth: Your Child's Path from Language to Literacy.
Diane McGuinness. This research-based book provides a very readable blueprint for parents on how to facilitate their children's healthy language development. It includes advice on how to talk with young children and how to handle beginning reading instruction.
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Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us About How to Teach Reading.
Diane McGuinness. This book provides an extremely comprehensive analysis of the research on teaching beginning reading and spelling. Dr. McGuinness explains that certain practices (learning sound-letter correspondences; practice blending and segmenting sounds in words; and copying/writing words, phrases and sentences) strongly predict reading success. Most so-called literacy activities have no effect and some, like sight-word memorization, have a strongly-negative effect.
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Why Boys are Different and How to Bring Out the Best in Them.
Bonnie Macmillan. This book discusses all the ways that boys differ from girls, including such things as their fetal development, brain differentiation, emotional differences, and so on. Dr. Macmillan attributes the world-wide gender gap in academic achievement (in favour of girls) to "multi-focus" teaching methods, pointing out that when a single-focus approach such as systematic phonics is used, sex differences are eradicated and sometimes the boys even outperform the girls. |
2003 |
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Getting It Wrong From the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget.
Kieran Egan. This important book isolates the essential ideas of progressivism, such as the superiority of hands-on and discovery learning, and the inferiority of rote learning. Tracing these beliefs back to an 18th-century English philosopher named Herbert Spencer, Dr. Egan shows that Spencer's scientific and social ideas are now considered museum pieces. |
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The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home.
Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. This book provides a blueprint for parents who wish to give their children a classical education at home. The curriculum is very demanding. For example, grade 9 students are expected to read 25 books, among them Homer's Iliad, Plato's Republic, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. |
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The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions are Destroying American Education.
Peter Brimelow. This is a devastating and marvelously-readable account of the malevolent role of the teachers' unions in American elementary and secondary education. The author compares the unions' political and economic monopoly to the industrial trusts that put a stranglehold on American business a hundred years ago (and which are now against the law). |
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The Myth of Ability: Nurturing Mathematical Talent in Every Child.
John Mighton. Anyone can learn math and anyone can teach it. Dr. Mighton has used this premise to develop a revolutionary teaching method that isolates and describes concepts so clearly anyone can understand them. Instead of fearing failure, kids learn from their own successes, and gain the confidence and skills they need to love learning. |
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Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at any Level.
Sally Shaywitz. The author, co-director of the Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention, discusses some excellent systematic phonics programs, along with key principles of teaching beginning reading. Among these principles are the importance of oral reading with immediate feedback, the need to teach to the point of "overlearning", the importance of early intervention, and the necessity for vocabulary development. |
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There are no Shortcuts.
The author is a teacher at a Los Angeles school where the vast majority of students are economically disadvantaged and have English as a second language. Yet Mr. Esquith's students score in the top 10% on standardized tests and go on to colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. He attributes their success to the fact that he and his students work harder, longer, and with more discipline than almost anyone else. |
2002 |
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The First Days
of School: How to be an Effective Teacher. Harry K. Wong and Rosemary T. Wong. This book lays out everything teachers
need to do to get the year off to a strong start — including such things as
preparing the classroom, teaching and enforcing routines, acting and
dressing for success, and much more. |
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Unraveling the ADD/ADHD Fiasco: Successful Parenting
Without Drugs. David B. Stein. Dr. Stein attacks many widely-held but
unsubstantiated assumptions about ADD/ADHD, such as that stimulant
medication and behavioural management techniques should be the mainstay of
an effective long-term way of managing ADD/ADHD, instead offering the
Caregivers’ Skills Program, a treatment alternative that sounds very
promising. |
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Class War: The
State of British Education.
Chris Woodhead. The former Chief Inspector of Schools explains the state of
education in England and his belief that the only way forward is school
vouchers. |
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How to
Increase your Child’s Verbal Intelligence: Read America’s Revolutionary
Language Wise Programme.
Carmen and Geoffrey McGuinness. This book lays out a program for augmenting
children’s intelligence, improving their ability to understand what they
read and hear. |
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Parenting a
Struggling Reader: A Guide to Diagnosing and Finding Help for Your Child’s
reading Difficulties. Susan L. Hall & Louisa C. Moats. Stressing the importance of catching
problems early, this book is an excellent guide to diagnosing and finding
help for children’s reading difficulties. |
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Teach Them All
to Read: Catching the Kids Who Fall Through the Cracks.
Elaine K. McEwan. This excellent book, directed primarily at elementary
teachers and principals, is a step-by-step blueprint for ensuing that every
single child learns to read. |
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Teachers as
Owners: A Key to Revitalizing Public Education.
Edward J. Dirkswager, ed.
This book
outlines how the model of the professional partnership can be adapted to fit
public education, allowing teachers to join doctors, lawyers, dentists and
so forth as managers of small businesses. |
2001 |
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Vocabulary
Development.
Steven A.
Stahl. Explaining that the number of words a person knows is highly related
to his or her reading comprehension and overall intelligence, the author
outlines the most effective ways to expand children’s vocabularies. |
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Can the Market
Save Our Schools?
Claudia R. Hepburn. This collection of papers makes a compelling case that
market mechanisms can dramatically improve the effectiveness of Canadian
education. |
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Core Knowledge
Preschool Sequence.
Core Knowledge Foundation. Unlike the Ontario curriculum, this material
stresses the important foundation of knowledge that preschool and
kindergarten should provide in order to develop literate, responsible, and
contributing citizens. |
2000
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Knowing and
Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers’ Understanding of Fundamental
Mathematics in China and the United States. Liping Ma. In a very thorough and technical manner, this book describes the
nature and development of the “profound understanding of fundamental
mathematics” that elementary teachers need in order to be accomplished
mathematics teachers. |
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From Hope to Harris: The Reshaping of Ontario’s
Schools. R.D. Gidney.
The author
traces the history of Ontario’s public schools from the Hope commission
(1950) to the present, conclusively demonstrating that there’s nothing new
under the sun. |
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The Academic
Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom.
Jeanne S.
Chall. In this book, the late Jeanne Chall, Emeritus Professor of Education
at Harvard University, analyzes a vast body of educational research, finding
that teacher-centred approaches result in higher achievement overall,
especially for disadvantaged children and those with learning difficulties.
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No Excuses:
Lessons from 21 High-Performing High-Poverty Schools.
Samuel Casey
Carter. This book profiles 21 high-poverty schools that prove children of
all races and income levels can take tough courses and succeed.
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1999
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Market Education: The Unknown History. Andrew Coulson. Drawing
on historical evidence, the author makes the case that competitive free-market systems of
education have constantly done a better job of serving the public's needs than state-run
school systems have. |
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Teach
Your Child to Read in Just Ten Minutes a Day. Sidney
Ledson. The author describes his fail-safe method, which he spent nearly 30 years
creating, testing and refining, for teaching young children how to read. |
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Losing
Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is
Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write and Reason. Sandra Stotsky. The
author analyzes the content of American readers over the years and shows how a requirement
for political correctness and social justice content has resulted in debased readers and
lower academic achievement. |
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Teachers Unions in Canada. Stephen B. Lawton, George Bedard,
Duncan MacLellan, Xiaobin Li. The authors found that Canadian labour laws are overly
favourable to labour. Consequently, in this book they advocate more balanced labour laws,
most notably freedom for teachers to choose from a variety of unions all competing with
one another to provide the best service. |
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The Case for School Choice: Models from the US, New Zealand, Denmark,
and Sweden. Claudia Rebanks Hepburn. The Fraser Institute. The author analyzes the
measures taken by countries which are successfully reforming their public education system
and finds that their success is due to charter schools, vouchers, tax credits and/or
school accountability systems. |
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The Teaching Gap: What Teachers Can Learn From The World's Best
Educators. James W. Stigler and James Hiebert. The authors describe the Japanese
system of teacher-led collaborative improvement which has resulted in the inspirational
teaching found in virtually every Japanese classroom today. |
1998
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Who Killed Canadian History? Jack Granatstein. Written in the
author's usual lively style, this book bemoans young Canadians' appalling lack of
knowledge of their own country. |
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Order paperback from the SQE
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How to Get the Right Education for your Child. Malkin Dare.
OQE/SAER Publications. This book provides practical strategies for the parents of children
who are struggling in school. Each option is explained in a readable and
information-packed manner. Read More |
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The Reformation of Canada's Schools: Breaking the Barriers to Parental Choice.
Mark Holmes. The author argues that only school choice can successfully address Canada's,
particularly Ontario's, educational mediocrity. The details of practical choice are
described and the necessary policies listed. |
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Teach Your Children Well: A Solution To Some Of North American's
Educational Problems. Maureen Somers and Michael Maloney. Cambridge Center for
Behavioral Studies. This book tells the story of Quinte Learning Centre in Belleville,
Ontario, where people of all ages were taught to read, write, spell, and do arithmetic in
an impressively short time. The Centre's methods, despite being in the public domain and
supported by the research, are being ignored by most educators. |
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Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect our Children's Minds - For
Better and Worse. Jane M. Healy. Once a bedazzled enthusiast of educational computing
but now a troubled skeptic, the author concludes that we are spending for too much money
on computers. |
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Running on Ritalin: A Physician Reflects on Children, Society and
Performance in a Pill. Laurence H. Diller. The author wonders why only medical
solutions are being proposed for behaviour problems that have many possible causes and
solutions. |
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Implementing a Highly Specified Curricular, Instructional, and
Organizational School Design in a High-Poverty, Urban Elementary School--Three Year
Results. This report describes the introduction and maintenance of a
highly-structured, academically-intensive, instructional program into a school in
Baltimore, Maryland. Despite the fact that Barclay is an inner-city school, the students
are doing spectacularly well. The report is short, easily-read and thrilling. |
1997
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Why Schoolchildren Can't Read. Bonnie Macmillan. The Institute
of Economic Affairs. This book provides insightful information on how children learn to
read. |
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Why Our Children Can't Read & What We Can Do about It: A
Scientific Revolution in Reading. Diane McGuinness. This book provides the scholarly
underpinning for the excellent Phono-Graphix method of teaching children to read. |
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The Teacher Unions: How the NEA and AFT Sabotage Reform and Hold Students,
Parents, Teachers and Taxpayers Hostage to Bureaucracy. Myron Lieberman. The book
shows how the teacher unions are bad for everyone concerned (except for their own
leaders). The author recommends that teachers be represented by professional organizations
instead. |
1996 |
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Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity for American Education.
Joe Nathan. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. |
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Break These Chains: The Battle for School Choice. Daniel
McGroarty. Empowering parents through school choice is the future of quality education.
McGroarty's street-level account of America's first-ever voucher program captures the
story perfectly - both the policy and the passion. |
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All Must Have Prizes. Melanie Phillips. The author charts the
rocky course of educational reform in England, a journey which began in 1988 with the
passage of the Education Reform Act. |
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Order from the
Core
Knowledge Foundation
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The Schools We Need: Why We Don't Have Them. E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
The author takes on what he terms "The Thoughtworld," the system of
child-centred ideas which dominate Canadian and American elementary education. His
"Critical Guide to Educational Terms and Phrases" alone is worth the cost of the
book. |
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School Resources and Student Performance. Eric A. Hanushek. In: Does
Money Matter? The Effect of School resources on Student Achievement and Adult Success.
Gary Burtless, Ed. The author surveyed 377 studies of the relationship between spending on
public education and student achievement. He found there to be little correlation. For
example, "neither variations in teacher-pupil ratio nor variations in teacher
education are systematically related to student performance." |
1995
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Order
the video and the paperback from SAER, 57 Allan Close, Red Deer, Alta. T4R 1A4, Fax
403-343-7042 - Visa and MasterCard are accepted, CND$24.95)
|
The Charter School Idea: Breaking Educational Gridlock. Joe Freedman. Society
for Advancing Educational Research. 1995. A video, accompanied by a very useful handbook
($7.00 without the video); the package will give you a comprehensive knowledge about this
promising new education reform tool. |
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Order item #251 from the American
Federation of Teachers
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What Secondary Students Abroad Are Expected to Know: Gateway Exams
Taken by Average-Achieving Students in France, Germany and Scotland. This handbook
includes sample examinations in math, native language, foreign language, science and
history/geography from France, Germany and Scotland. These exams are taken by the majority
of students at around grade 10. The level of difficulty is staggeringly high compared to
what is expected of Canadian students. |
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Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About
Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add. Charles J. Sykes. This book provides an
entertaining, penetrating and comprehensive look at child-centred learning. |
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Core Knowledge Sequence: Content Guidelines for Grades K-6. An
excellent content (not skills) curriculum, it is a planned progression of specific
knowledge in history, geography, math, science, language and fine arts. Although American,
it can readily be adapted for Canadian children. |
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Order from Renouf Publishing
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Learning About Schools: What Parents Need to Know and How They Can
Find Out. Peter Coleman. This handbook is designed to help parents choose the best
school for their children. The author describes how to identify the characteristics of
good schools, ask the right questions, and evaluate the answers. From the series of IRPP
monographs on education (Institute for Research in Public Policy, Montreal) |
|
Order
from Renouf Publishing
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Educational Choice: Necessary But Not Sufficient. Bruce W.
Wilkinson. The author calls for greater public choice in education to improve the
efficiency and accountability of the school system. |
|
Order
from Renouf Publishing
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Busting Bureaucracy to Reclaim Our Schools. Stephen B. Lawton.
This monograph begins by describing the growth of the "bureaucratic bondage" of
public education in Canada and the reasons why changes are necessary. Dr. Lawton goes on
to recommend that our current bureaucratic model be replaced by one based more on
market-like exchanges, such as charter schools. |
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Order from Renouf Publishing
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The State of Education in Canada. Thomas T. Schweitzer. The
author has prepared a report card on the performance of Canadian schools. He found that
our students' performance is "mediocre at best, that there are very big
inter-provincial differences in educational achievement" (at age 16, the average
student in the best province is six years ahead of the average student in the worst
province) and that "there has been no improvement, possibly even some deterioration,
in achievement over the last quarter century." |
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If Learning is So Natural, Why Am I Going to School? A Parent's Guide.
Andrew Nikiforuk. Written in his trademark flamboyant style, the book includes many of
Nikiforuk's most popular Globe and Mail columns. It sheds light on most aspects of the "progressive" philosophy of education. |
1993
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War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse. Siegfried
Engelmann. An easy read, this book describes the proven methods called Direct Instruction
which the author helped to develop and implement in schools. |
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Education and Training in Canada. Economic Council of Canada. An
excellent report, it includes the results of international, inter-provincial and
inter-temporal comparisons of achievement. |
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Out of print (McFarlane
Walter and Ross)
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School's Out: The Catastrophe in Public Education & What We Can Do about It.
Andrew Nikiforuk. Written in an entertaining manner, this book lays on the line what is
happening to Canadian children. |
