After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform by Andrea Gabor uses examples of successful and failing schools to demonstrate how the principles promoted by W. Edwards Deming can lead to school improvement. She provides extended histories of reforms in New York City, Massachusetts, Texas, and New Orleans to show how democratic grassroots reforms are more likely to work than the top-down approaches used in most states and cities. Everyone with the power to impact school reform needs to read this.

Code Breaker: Increase Creativity, Remix Assessment, and Develop a Class of Coder Ninjas! by Brian Aspinall shares his experiences and those of some colleagues in the process of teaching coding from kindergarten to high school. It deals with computational thinking which is a fundamental skill at the heart of engineering and mathematics. It includes coding and much more, and can even happen without technology. Make sure your school has a few copies.