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🧲 Books like this

Among Schoolchildren

Tracy Kidder · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

Dale Russakoff · 246 pages

"Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Christie, and Cory Booker were ready to reform our failing schools. They got an education. When Mark Zuckerberg announced in front of a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the Newark Schools -- and to solve the education crisis in every city in America -- it looked like a huge win for then-mayor Cory Booker and governor Chris Christie. But their pla

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfictionSociology
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The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

Amanda Ripley · 320 pages

Following three teenagers who chose to spend one school year living in Finland, South Korea, and Poland, a literary journalist recounts how attitudes, parenting, and rigorous teaching have revolutionized these countries' education results. In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they've never seen before. They are learning to think

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfictionSociology
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How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

Paul Tough · 256 pages

Why do some children succeed while others fail? The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in this book the author argues that the qualities that matter most have more to do with character: skills like perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-con

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfictionSociology
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EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfictionSociology
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The Death Class: A True Story About Life

Erika Hayasaki · 275 pages

A journalist details how Norma Bowe, the professor of a popular class on the stages of dying, death, and bereavement at Kean University in New Jersey, shows her students how to truly heal and live their lives through contemplating the end.

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfictionSociology
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The Gatekeepers : Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College

Jacques Steinberg · 323 pages

A riveting, behind-the-scenes look at how a top college picks the best of the lotIn the fall of 1999, New York Times education reporter Jacques Steinberg was given an unprecedented opportunity to observe the admissions process at prestigious Wesleyan University. Over the course of nearly a year, Steinberg accompanied admissions officer Ralph Figueroa on a tour to assess and recruit the most promis

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfiction
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Train Go Sorry

Leah Hager Cohen · 296 pages

"Train go sorry" is the American Sign Language expression for "missing the boat." Indeed, missed connections characterize many interactions between the deaf and hearing worlds, including the failure to recognize that deaf people are members of a unique culture. In this intimate chronicle of Lexington School for the Deaf, Leah Hager Cohen brings this extraordinary culture to life and captures a piv

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfiction
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Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools

Steven Brill · 496 pages

In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America's failure to educate its children and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill's vivid narrative -- filled with unexpected twists and turns -- takes us from the Oval Office, where President Obama signs off on an unprecedented plan that will infuriate t

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfiction
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A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League

Ron Suskind · 390 pages

At Ballou Senior High, a crime-infested school in Washington, D.C., honor students have learned to keep their heads down. Like most inner-city kids, they know that any special attention in a place this dangerous can make you a target of violence. But Cedric Jennings will not swallow his pride, and with unwavering support from his mother, he studies and strives as if his life depends on it--and it

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfiction
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High School Confidential: Secrets of an Undercover Student

Jeremy Iversen · 455 pages

"As unreal as everything else had been, the locker was positively ethereal. It glinted in the sun, vivid neon Mirador green, number 6340. I approached it cautiously, hardly daring to think. By the laws of fate and time, I wasn't supposed to have a locker at a Southern California high school. I was supposed to hang my wet tan overcoat by the umbrella stand in a gray stone tower on Wall Street. I kn

Investigative JournalismEducationNonfictionSociology
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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 320 pages

*A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfictionSociology
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Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul

Edward Humes · 380 pages

What should we teach our children about where we come from?Is evolution good science? Is it a lie? Is it incompatible with faith?Did Charles Darwin really say man came from monkeys? Have scientists really detected "intelligent design"—evidence of a creator—in nature?What happens when a town school board decides to confront such questions head-on, thrusting its students, then an entire community, o

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfiction
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Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

Michael Sokolove · 347 pages

Explores the life, career, and influence of Levittown, Pa., high school teacher and theater director Lou Volpe, focusing on his last school years and following a group of student actors as they work through dramas, both on stage and off.

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfiction
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The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

Michael Ruhlman · 305 pages

Just over a decade ago, journalist Michael Ruhlman donned a chef's jacket and houndstooth-check pants to join the students at the Culinary Institute of America, the country's oldest and most influential cooking school. But The Making of a Chef is not just about holding a knife or slicing an onion; it's also about the nature and spirit of being a professional cook and the people who enter the profe

Investigative JournalismEducationNonfiction
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For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education

Christopher Emdin · 220 pages

"Merging real stories with theory, research, and practice, a prominent scholar offers a new approach to teaching and learning for every stakeholder in urban education. Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in science classrooms as a young man of color, Christopher Emdin offers a new lens on and approach to teaching in urban schools. Putting forth his theory of Reality

EducationNonfictionSociology
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EducationNonfictionSociology
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A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn't in Providing an Excellent Education for All

Wendy Kopp · 229 pages

America's failure to educate millions of children is a crisis that strikes at our fundamental ideals and health as a nation. Since 1990, Teach For America has been building a movement to end educational inequity in America. Now its founder, Wendy Kopp, shares the lessons learned from the experiences of more than 25,000 teachers and alumni who have taught and led schools in low-income communities .

EducationNonfictionSociology
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EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfiction
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EducationNonfictionSociology
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Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa · 265 pages

A statistical analysis of survey responses, transcript data, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment to determine how well students learn during their first few years of college. The analysis shows almost half the students surveyed show no significant improvement in skills such as critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. The analysis goes on to consider possible causes for this educatio

EducationNonfictionSociology
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EducationNonfictionSociology
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EducationNonfictionSociology
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This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

Marilyn Johnson · 280 pages

Buried in info? Cross-eyed over technology? From the bottom of a pile of paper and discs, books, e-books, and scattered thumb drives comes a cry of hope: Make way for the librarians! They want to help. They're not selling a thing. And librarians know best how to beat a path through the googolplex sources of information available to us, writes Marilyn Johnson, whose previous book, The Dead Beat, br

EducationInvestigative JournalismNonfiction
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