Children's Book Gift List!

Last weekend, I finally had a chance to plant myself in the children's book section and check out some of your gift suggestions. I picked my five favorites, but take a look at the full list under comments here. In no particular order:

1) Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity (Mo Willems)

2) Rules (Cynthia Lord)

3) Sugar Cane (Patricia Storace)

4) Probuditi (Chris Van Allsburg)

5) Trail Paper Poetry Pop-Up (David Pelham)

Thank you to everyone who suggested a book!

Help Me Make a Children's Book Gift List!

The holidays are coming up fast, and I confess that I love to give children's books to adults and kids alike.

Anyway, can you help me by recommending your favorite new children's books (that would also make good presents)? I have an Olivia thing, so Olivia Helps With Christmas is one of my top picks for little people. Some others that I'm considering include:

Incredible Book-Eating Boy

The Chronicles of Narnia Pop-Up Book

Thank You Bear

Trail: Paper Poetry Pop-Up

Edwardo: The Horriblest Boy in the Whole Wide World

The Higher Power of Lucky

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: A Pop-Up Adaptation (not new, but wonderful.)

Or for the more adult-oriented edu-giftee, try the New Yorker Book of Teacher Cartoons.

For a great blog on kiddie lit, check out "The Miss Rumphius Effect."

Gold Star Book Award! Mitchell Stevens, Creating a Class

A month ago, I nominated four of this fall's best academic books for the first eduwonkette "Gold Star Award." All four were a treat - I would honestly recommend reading all of them - but I fell in love with one.

That book was Mitchell Stevens' Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Whether you are a teacher, a guidance counselor, a parent, a high school student, or a policy wonk, this book will introduce you to the inner workings of an elite liberal arts admissions office. Don't be fooled - this is not your garden variety expose book by a former admissions officer - there are already enough of these that they deserve their own genre.

In this book, Mitchell Stevens does something different - he spends a year and a half inside an admissions office, and shows how the increasingly cutthroat competition for institutional standing affects every aspect of the admissions process. He reveals how the need to increase the school's relative standing collides with ideals of educational opportunity, as officers reject applications because the parents can't pay, take applications because the college wants to "get a thing going" with various private schools, and recruit at more advantaged high schools simply because they have the organizational machinery to meet the needs of admissions officers. There are a lot of parallels to K-12 accountability policies.

Certainly, a lot of these behaviors have been reported elsewhere - but Stevens helps the reader to understand how the structure of the higher education market causes these behaviors, and how this has changed over time. And he never falls into the common journalistic trap of calling these officers rotten apples when they do and say things that raise eyebrows. Instead, he helps the reader understand why she would have done the job exactly the same way.

Higher education is not my area of study, and I think that the frenzy over elite college admissions is overplayed. (See an earlier post about income effects of attending an elite school.) But Stevens makes an important point about the role of elite colleges as an elaborate insurance policy for the wealthy. In an increasingly uncertain world, middle class futures aren't guaranteed for the kids of affluent parents. While a college degree is more necessary than ever, half of the kids who enter college don't finish. And all else equal, kids are much more likely to graduate at elite schools.

Perhaps best of all - and what makes Creating a Class stand apart from your average academic book - it was a pleasure to read and an important contribution. In addition to lending new insights about the structure of opportunity in higher education, Stevens is wickedly witty.

So go pick up Creating a Class, everyone. And kudos to Stevens for turning in this important piece of scholarship.

Don't forget to read these books!

I've nominated four of this fall's best academic books on education for the first (quasi-recurring) eduwonkette gold star award. Read more about these books here. Award to be announced on October 15th.

• Mitchell Stevens, Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites
• Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider, Charter Schools - Hope or Hype?
• Bruce Fuller, Standaridzed Childhoods: The Political and Cultural Struggle Over Early Education
• David Kirp, The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics
  

Gold Star Book Award Nominees

I've nominated four of this fall's best academic books on education for the first (quasi-recurring) eduwonkette gold star award. Here are the books and short blurbs from the publishers about each of them. Give me a couple of weeks to get through them all and I'll announce a winner. In no particular order:

Mitchell Stevens, Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites

In real life, Mitchell Stevens is a professor in bustling New York. But for a year and a half, he worked in the admissions office of a bucolic New England college that is known for its high academic standards, beautiful campus, and social conscience. Ambitious high schoolers and savvy guidance counselors know that admission here is highly competitive. But creating classes, Stevens finds, is a lot more complicated than most people imagine.

Admissions officers love students but they work for the good of the school. They must bring each class in "on budget," burnish the statistics so crucial to institutional prestige, and take care of their colleagues in the athletic department and the development office. Stevens shows that the job cannot be done without "systematic preferencing," and racial affirmative action is the least of it. Kids have an edge if their parents can pay full tuition, if they attend high schools with exotic zip codes, if they are athletes--especially football players--and even if they are popular.

Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider, Charter Schools - Hope or Hype?

Over the past several years, privately run, publicly funded charter schools have been sold to the American public as an education alternative promising better student achievement, greater parent satisfaction, and more vibrant school communities. But are charter schools delivering on their promise? Or are they just hype as critics contend, a costly experiment that is bleeding tax dollars from public schools? In this book, Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider tackle these questions about one of the thorniest policy reforms in the nation today.

Using an exceptionally rigorous research approach, the authors investigate charter schools in Washington, D.C., carefully examining school data going back more than a decade, interpreting scores of interviews with parents, students, and teachers, and meticulously measuring how charter schools perform compared to traditional public schools. Their conclusions are sobering.

Buckley and Schneider show that charter-school students are not outperforming students in traditional public schools, that the quality of charter-school education varies widely from school to school, and that parent enthusiasm for charter schools starts out strong but fades over time. And they argue that while charter schools may meet the most basic test of sound public policy--they do no harm--the evidence suggests they all too often fall short of advocates' claims.

Bruce Fuller, Standaridzed Childhoods: The Political and Cultural Struggle Over Early Education

A colorful array of childcare and preschool options blossomed in the 1970s as the feminist movement spurred mothers into careers and community organizations nurtured new programs. Now a small circle of activists aim to bring more order to childhood. Their battle cry, heard in a growing number of state capitals and school reform circles, seeks to create a more standard, state-run preschool system. For young children already facing the rigors of play dates and harried parents juggling the strains of work and family, government is moving in to standardize childhood.

Sociologist Bruce Fuller traveled the country—sitting in preschool classrooms, delving into the birth of universal preschool in California and Oklahoma, and interviewing this robust movement’s eager leaders—to understand the ideologies of childhood and the raw political forces at play. He details how these new progressives earnestly seek to extend the rigors of public schooling down into the lives of very young children. Fuller then illuminates the stiff resistance by some children’s activists, ethnic leaders, and conservatives, who hold less trust in government solutions and more faith in nonprofits and local groups in contributing to the upbringing of young children. Drawing on the voices of teachers, community activists, and political leaders actively shaping this debate,Standardized Childhood shows why the universal preschool movement is attracting such robust support—and strident opposition—nationwide.

David Kirp, The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics

The rich have always valued early education, and for the past forty years, millions of poor kids have had Head Start. Now, more and more middle class parents have realized that a good preschool is the smartest investment they can make in their children's future in a competitive world. As The Sandbox Investment shows, their needs are key to the growing call for universal preschool.

Writing with the verve of a magazine journalist and the authority of a scholar, David L. Kirp makes the ideal guide to this quiet movement. He crouches in classrooms where committed teachers engage lively four-year-olds, and reveals the findings of an extraordinary longitudinal study that shows the life-changing impact of preschool. He talks with cutting-edge researchers from neuroscience and genetics to economics, whose findings increasingly show how powerfully early childhood shapes the arc of children's lives.