Our Education Reading List

An ongoing map of useful efforts to address excellence within education

Introduction

We are far from the first to focus on questions of excellence in education. For a long while, though, interest in these questions has been fractured: an insight from psychology here and one from economics there, whether from the odd autodidact blogger or a professional in a seemingly unrelated field… Still, these disparate investigations studying a single aspect of the path towards expertise often take the matter more seriously than the field of education itself does.

Here follows a reading list that attempts to triangulate, using these fragments, something like a baseline of common knowledge. Our ongoing goal is to build a corpus for ambitious educators and learners to work from.

For now, we exclude some critical topics altogether and touch on others more briefly than they deserve. This list is idiosyncratic by design. It is not complete comprehensive: its immediate goal is to be useful: to point towards a particular intersection, neglected within the mainstream of education, that demands more examination.

This reading list is a living document. As we find relevant books, research papers, case studies, and essays, we will add them to the list. Please make recommendations in the comments for sources you’ve found especially inspiring!

Finally, the presence of an item on this list is not an endorsement of its methodology or conclusions. (Nor could it be, since the different works don’t cohere.) Rather, it is an endorsement of the work’s importance and relevance for thinking about questions of excellence in education today.

Theory

Painting a Vision

• Does the Education System Adequately Serve Advanced Students? by Michael Pershan and Jack Despain Zhou: An overview of the state of advanced education in the United States: ability grouping, acceleration, personalization software, the conflict of goals in public education, and practical advice for parents, educators, and reformers.

• The Aristocratic Tutoring series by Erik Hoel:

  • Why we stopped making Einsteins

  • Objections to the importance of aristocratic tutoring

  • How geniuses used to be raised

Erik Hoel argues that we are failing to produce modern-day Einsteins, not due to a lack of information access or genetic potential, but rather due to the death of "aristocratic tutoring"an intensive, one-on-one educational model that historically shaped many of history's greatest minds.

• Childhoods of Exceptional People by Henrik Karlsson, making a similar case after examining the biographies of 42 historical geniuses.

Systemic Critiques

• Education Doesn't Work by Freddie deBoer: deBoer argues that no intervention has been found that can meaningfully change the rank order of students relative to their peers.

• The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan: Caplan argues that most education is a massive, wasteful signaling tournament where students jump through hoops to prove they're smart, conscientious, and conformist enough to be good employees. What should we do, per Caplan? Dramatically reduce public funding for education.

Policy History

• Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment, by Paul Ciotti: In 1985, a judge ordered the Kansas City, Missouri school district to massively increase its spending with a focus on desegregation and closing the ability gap. After more than a decade and three Supreme Court rulings, the experiment failed in most measurable ways.

• Project Follow Through: A Case Study by Cathy L. Watkins (see also Zach Groshell’s podcast summary): Project Follow Through was the largest and most expensive education experiment funded by the US government. Of the curricula tried, only one (Direct Instruction) was found to meaningfully move the needle. The results of the study were almost completely ignored in practice and in funding.

• Making Sense of the Tracking and Ability Grouping Debate by Tom Loveless: An excellent overview of one of the most heated disputes in education: should students be placed on distinct “tracks” based on demonstrated level? He examines facially contradictory meta-analyses, ultimately concluding that so long as you accept as legitimate the studies of academically enriched and accelerated programs, tracking unambiguously helps high achievers.

Early Childhood Development and Education

• Raise a Genius! by László Polgár: The quintessential early childhood training text. Polgár’s theories were incomplete and at times eccentric, but he called his shots, devoting his life to raising chess prodigies and succeeding.

• How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read by Larry Sanger: What of more fundamental skills? Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger outlines the process by which he taught his two-year-old son to read. Erik Hoel has a series of blog posts following much the same sequence.

• Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua: Battle Hymn did more than almost any other book to focus conversations on the pursuit of excellence in child-rearing and the question of what it looks like, as Chua outlined just how high she kept childhood standards for her kids and why.

• The Scientist in the Crib by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl: Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl examine early developmental research to conclude that infants are sophisticated Bayesian learners, running controlled experiments through play and updating probability distributions about physics, language, and minds. Rigorous overview of the cognitive science of early childhood.

• Educating the Evolved Mind by David Geary: Rare in the field of ed, Geary appropriately treats humans as evolutionary creatures, and explores the mismatch between evolved cognitive systems and modern educational demands, arguing for curricula that align with innate learning mechanisms (e.g., play-based learning for young children, explicit instruction for secondary skills like literacy).

The Science of Learning

• The Math Academy Way by Justin Skycak: A layman’s overview of the state-of-the-art in learning research. Skycak, who formerly ran one of the most advanced math/CS tracks in the country (culminating in students doing graduate-level coursework), outlines what effective learning looks like from the ground up.

• Teaching the Science of Learning by Yana Weinstein, Christopher R. Madan and Megan A. Sumeracki: A quick, effective literature review of six robustly supported cognitive strategies–spaced practice, interleaving, retrieval practice, elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding.

• Creating Desirable Difficulties To Enhance Learning by Elizabeth L. Bjork and Robert Bjork: Bjork and Bjork are the rarest sort of education researchers: rigorous, empirically focused, and insightful. This chapter provides a summary of some of their key findings, focused on the point that much of what works in instruction is unintuitive and even frustrating in the moment.

• When Can You Trust the Experts? by Daniel Willingham: A skeptically-minded education researcher’s overview of education research, written for parents and educators.

• Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work by Paul A. Kirschner, John Sweller & Richard E. Clark: Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark make the case that minimally guided instruction, despite strong intuitive appeal, ignores the reality of human cognition and half a century of empirical evidence demonstrating that it is less effective than more directly guided instruction.

Expertise

• Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson: Ericsson did more to advance the empirical study of expertise than, realistically, anyone else. Peak is his layman’s summary of his work, starting from his description of his research on digit span, and winding through the cognitive differences between novices and experts, developments that can only happen during early childhood, and many more of his ideas.

• Is the Deliberate Practice View Defensible? A Review of Evidence and Discussion of Issues by David Z. Hambrick, Brooke N. Macnamara, and Frederick L. Oswald: Hambrick et al. agree with Ericsson that expertise is acquired gradually and massive domain-specific gains are possible, but note serious issues with the idea that deliberate practice is sufficient to explain gaps between individuals and inconsistencies in the definition of deliberate practice across time.

• Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer: A journalist practices memory skills for a year while learning from the best mnemonists in the United States. Oriented towards a popular audience, but does an excellent job painting a vision of what is possible with focused training.

• The Mundanity of Excellence by Daniel F. Chambliss: After examining competitive swimmers, Chambliss argues that Olympic excellence arises from an accumulation of small qualitative improvements—refined techniques, disciplined habits, and consistent, incremental actions—rather than innate talent or sheer effort, with swimmers at different levels occupying distinct “worlds” that direct them towards fundamentally different goals.

• Developing Talent In Young People by Benjamin Bloom: Bloom, a leading educational psychologist, studied 120 experts across six disciplines (swimmers, sculptors, concert pianists, tennis players, research mathematicians, and research neurologists), examining their childhood training and the processes along which their talents developed.

Teaching outlier children: Acceleration, ability grouping, and gifted research

The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (list compiled by Gwern) is one of the longest-running and largest longitudinal studies on unusually talented children, following the top fraction of students by mathematical ability on the SAT, taken at age 13. Some papers drawn from it:

• When less is more: Effects of grade skipping on adult STEM productivity among mathematically precocious adolescents (2013): Grade skipping led to earlier and more long-term academic productivity.

• Top 1 in 10000 (2001): A close look into the characteristics of far outliers, notably emphasizing the importance of appropriate developmental placement.

• Beyond the Threshold Hypothesis (2010): Even among adolescents in the top 1% of quantitative ability, higher early scores predict better outcomes later on. There is no cap at which this stops.

• Exceptionally Gifted Children by Miraca Gross (along with a shorter follow-up focused on long-term outcomes of academic acceleration or the lack thereof): Gross tracked a cohort of 60 Australian children with tested IQs above 160 (notably including mathematician Terence Tao) for 20 years. Those who were accelerated had dramatically better education experiences than those who were not.

• A Nation Deceived by Nicholas Colangelo, Susan Assouline, and Miraca Gross: Presents the case for academic acceleration of talented students from some of its strongest advocates, exhaustively cataloguing the gap between research and practice on the topic.

Tests and Testing

• You Aren't Actually Mad at the SATs by Freddie deBoer: Rebuts five myths about tests: that SAT/ACT don’t predict college success, that the SAT only tells you how well a student takes the SAT, that the SAT just replicates the income distribution, that the SAT is easily gamed with expensive tutoring, and that going test optional increases racial diversity.

• Report of the UC Academic Council Standardized Testing Task Force: The University of California system commissioned a detailed report when deciding whether to drop standardized tests in admissions. Results: “Standardized test scores aid in predicting important aspects of student success, including undergraduate grade point average (UGPA), retention, and completion. … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority students (URMs), who are first-generation, or whose families are low-income...”

• The g Factor by Arthur Jensen: Seminal work on psychometrics. Provides a thorough, informed overview of the background logic behind standardized tests and intelligence research.

• What Is Intelligence? by James Flynn: A carefully researched perspective on IQ gains through the twentieth century, and what they say about the nature of intelligence and the relation of IQ tests to it.

Practice

This section highlights particular schools and programs. It remains embryonic. As we move forward and examine more curricula and schools, we will steadily expand to include the best or most interesting options.

School Case Studies

• Oakland LEARN: A San Francisco microschool with a tiny handful of students, focused on balancing the science of learning with a free-form structure in which students set their own goals and choose their own schedules.

  • Starting a Microschool, with Kelsey Piper and June Kreml

• Michaela Community School: Michaela is the school with the highest rate of academic progress in Britain, and takes a strict and emphatic approach to discipline and rigor to do so.

  • Wikipedia

  • The Michaela Method Revisited

  • 'You Can Hear a Pin Drop': The Rise of Super Strict Schools in England

  • “I’m an education radical” – Katharine Birbalsingh, Michaela Community School and the power of culture - Teachwire

• Thales Academy: The Thales Academy system in North Carolina is a private school chain focused on minimal costs and high-efficacy methods, notable particularly for its use of Direct Instruction in elementary school, shifting towards a classical education model as students age.

  • A libertarian builds low-cost private school for the masses

• St. John Paul II Preparatory School: St. John Paul II Preparatory School in Missouri is a high performing hybrid school, which meets in person three days per week, and schools from home two days per week, using a core curriculum provided by the school and whichever additions parents choose. Strong example of an attempt to combine the benefits of homeschool with the accountability and reliability structures of a classroom and school environment.

Curricula and Specific Resources

Mathematics

• Art of Problem Solving is the undisputed champion in mathematics education for outlier students. Virtually every Math Olympiad winner trains using its curriculum. It offers rigorous, comprehensive education focused on problem-solving skills and competition math, including both textbooks and a free online tool.

• Math Academy: Math Academy is what happens when an edtech project takes the science of learning seriously in every part of its design. It maps out the structure of math from elementary school to university-level topics, then pulls students through every stage of that structure starting with a diagnostic test and carrying on with rigorous training targeted at every gap in student understanding as efficiently as possible.

Reading

• Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, by Siegfried Engelmann with Phyllis Haddox and Elaine Bruner: The creator of Direct Instruction provides a step-by-step, phonics-based approach to reading instruction.

Training narrow skills

This section will grow. Right now, we imagine compiling resources for various specific skills that are time-sensitive for children to learn. This is both practically useful and helps us understand nature-nurture effects in skill formation and distribution better. An example of such a skill is musical pitch:

Absolute Pitch

Diana Deutsch - Absolute Pitch

A longitudinal study of the process of acquiring absolute pitch - “Twenty-four young children (aged 2 to 6 years) without AP were trained to acquire AP using Eguchi’s (1991) Chord Identification Method (CIM). All children were able to acquire AP (except two who ceased training). Results suggest that, at a minimum, children younger than 6 years old are capable of acquiring AP through intentional training.”

Perfect Pitch Program - Eguchi Method - Unfortunately, English-language resources diving into the Eguchi method in detail are somewhat limited. The approach is more common in Japan; this page provides an overview.

Note: Many musicians report some skepticism about the value of absolute pitch, pointing out for example that it can turn “sour” with age, making everything sound a bit out of tune. That it can be acquired does not mean it must be acquired, but it’s crucial to understand that it is learnable, not innate.

---

We present this list as a start to the conversation around excellence, not its conclusion. There’s plenty more ground to cover and other domains worth considering—in particular, prodding deeper at questions like “What does excellence look like for instruction tailored at the average or struggling student?”, examining successful systems from around the world, or investigating how excellence manifests in domains beyond the purely academic. If you have suggestions for refinement, additions, or critiques, please provide them in the comments or in our other discussion channels.

---

Interested in getting involved?

• Join our Discord server.

• Fill out our volunteer form.

• Donate.

• For other ideas, email us at centerforedprogress@gmail.com.