New York Times: Best Education Books of 2013

Deborah Hofmann, senior editor of the New York Times Best Sellers List, has put together a new list of education books that is sure to raise some eyebrows.

Offering an eclectic list that includes books such as Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error, Sal Khan’s One World Schoolhouse, and Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World, these 75 books include books across a range of fields, some of which only loosely fit the category of education.

Hofmann admits that the list is subjective, and here is her methodology:

The list was compiled by looking at every adult nonfiction title that was reported each week to the New York Times Best-Seller Lists though Dec. 7, in both print and electronic formats. This includes titles that were released in earlier years, but continue to enjoy sales; for this first experiment, we wanted to cast a wide net to see what turned up naturally.

I classified a title as “Education” after I examined multiple standard sources, including its industry identifiers, reviews and interviews, to create a sort of card catalog of titles that — to this editor’s sensibilities — spoke to an enduring appetite for books that try to teach the reader, or tell us how we learn or why we learn — or, sometimes, why we do not. There were no vetting experts or outside education consultants. Had that been the case, we might still be debating.

Although some titles are familiar for having made the traditional best-seller list that is published weekly in the Book Review, many of the titles are books that were reported, but perhaps often in quantities too low in any given weeks to qualify for the traditional rankings. Cumulatively over the months and in this subgroup, however, they emerge in clearer relief. They are ranked by their relative reported sales, the same way we rank all books on the best-seller lists.

Either way, the list is a good way to reflect on some of the trends and debates in education over the last few years and is sure to mean you add some new books to your reading list.

For more information, please visit: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/reading-list-the-top-75-new-york-times-best-selling-education-books-of-2013/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1