By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Amazon Description: In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men — bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son — and readers — the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

By Glenn E. Singleton

Amazon Description: Courageous Conversations about Race allows you to deepen your personal understanding of race and its impact on all students. You will discover how to apply the strategy and protocol to

• Embrace the four agreements―stay engaged, speak your truth, experience discomfort, and accept non-closure―to deepen interracial dialogue

• Build a foundation for advancing equity using the Six Conditions of Courageous Conversation

• Examine the role of race in your life using the Courageous Conversation Compass to understand and guide your actions

• Expand your capacity to lead others on the journey in addressing institutional racism disparities

This guide empowers you with practical tools and insights to successfully challenge racist policies and practice in schools and beyond. It is your call to leadership―one that will impact student achievement and drive systemic transformation.

By Zaretta Hammond

Amazon Description: To close the achievement gap, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement. Culturally responsive instruction has shown promise, but many teachers have struggled with its implementation―until now.  In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain compatible culturally responsive instruction. The book includes:

• Information on how one’s culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships

• Ten "key moves" to build students’ learner operating systems and prepare them to become independent learners

• Prompts for action and valuable self-reflection

By Paul Bambrick-Santoyo

Amazon Description: Data-driven instruction is the philosophy that schools should focus on two simple questions: how do you know if are students learning? And when they are not, what do you do about it?

Driven by Data 2.0 is a practical guide that answers these questions to empower schools to achieve significant gains in student achievement. Rooted in a proven framework that has been implemented in thousands of schools, the book presents what makes schools successful along with tools to put the framework into place to make data work for your schools:

• Assess — set the roadmap for learning

• Analyze — identify why students struggle

• Act — teach more effectively what students need

• Build the culture—train and develop your staff so that data-driven instruction can thrive

If you’re a K – 12 leader, coach, or teacher looking to implement data-driven instruction in your school district, Driven by Data 2.0 has the tools to train your staff: PD materials, videos of exemplar practice and all the resources you need to achieve remarkable results.  

By Christopher Emdin

Amazon Description: Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in classrooms as a young man of color and merging his experiences with more than a decade of teaching and researching in urban America, award-winning educator Christopher Emdin offers a new lens on an approach to teaching and learning in urban schools. For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y’all Too is the much-needed antidote to traditional top-down pedagogy and promises to radically reframe the landscape of urban education for the better.

By Nathan Maynard and Brad Weinstein

Amazon Description: Replace traditional school discipline with a proven system, founded on restorative justice  In a book that should become your new blueprint for school discipline, teachers, presenters, and school leaders Nathan Maynard and Brad Weinstein demonstrate how to eliminate punishment and build a culture of responsible students and independent learners. In Hack Learning Series Book 22, you learn to:

• Reduce repeated negative behaviors

• Build student self-regulation and empathy

• Enhance communication and collaboration

• Identify the true cause of negative behaviors

• Use restorative circles to reflect on behaviors and discuss impactful change

By Ibram X. Kendi

Amazon Description: Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.

Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.

By Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.

Amazon Description: After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but ground-breaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.

By Paulo Freire

Amazon Description: First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing.

By Paul Bambrick-Santoyo

Amazon Description: A Principal Manager’s Guide to Leverage Leadership answers the question that district leaders have been asking across the country:  if Leverage Leadership is a roadmap for principals on how to lead great schools, what can principal managers and districts do to support them on that path?  A Principal Manager’s Guide to Leverage Leadership offers a step-by-step guide to coaching principals to the highest levels of achievement, and it is rooted in studying the most successful principal managers and districts across the country.  It can be used by principal managers/supervisors, superintendents, district and state leadership, and principal training organizations to accelerate the growth of principals in your community.  Used in conjunction with Leverage Leadership 2.0, this book identifies the key actions principal managers should take to create exceptional school leaders, integrating the seven levers of leadership into district culture from the principal manager on up. With a particular emphasis on the two “super-levers” of data-driven instruction and student culture, this book is packed with advice, professional development materials, and real-world videos of principal managers in action, offering principal managers a valuable resource for bringing about change.

By Monique W. Morris

Amazon Description: In a work that Lisa Delpit calls “imperative reading,” Monique W. Morris chronicles the experiences of Black girls across the country whose complex lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Painting “a chilling picture of the plight of black girls and women today” (The Atlantic), Morris exposes a world of confined potential and supports the rising movement to challenge the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures. At a moment when Black girls are the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system, Pushout is truly a book “for everyone who cares about children” (Washington Post).

By Maisha T. Winn & Lawrence T. Winn

Amazon Description: Restorative Justice in Education makes the case for restorative justice as a practice as much as it is a paradigm. Through essays, case studies, and interviews, the book outlines for educators and teacher educators how restorative justice can be leveraged to teach across disciplines. Building on the success of Justice on Both Sides, this book consists of four sections that explore instructional practices in history, race, justice, and language. The contributors examine a variety of educational issues and questions for teachers to explore through a transformative justice lens. Topics include how access to history and histories can promote agency for and among marginalized students; how science and mathematics education can be reimagined to catalyse the creativity and capacity of Black math learners; and how restorative justice practices can foster healthy student identities.

By Jason Reynolds

Amazon Description: The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited. Through a gripping, fast-paced, and energizing narrative written by beloved award-winner Jason Reynolds, this book shines a light on the many insidious forms of racist ideas--and on ways readers can identify and stamp out racist thoughts in their daily lives.

By Pedro A. Noguera

Amazon Description: For many years to come, race will continue to be a source of controversy and conflict in American society. For many of us it will continue to shape where we live, pray, go to school, and socialize. We cannot simply wish away the existence of race or racism, but we can take steps to lessen the ways in which the categories trap and confine us. Educators, who should be committed to helping young people realize their intellectual potential as they make their way toward adulthood, have a responsibility to help them find ways to expand identities related to race so that they can experience the fullest possibility of all that they may become. In this brutally honest—yet ultimately hopeful— book Pedro Noguera examines the many facets of race in schools and society and reveals what it will take to improve outcomes for all students. From achievement gaps to immigration, Noguera offers a rich and compelling picture of a complex issue that affects all of us.

By Linda E. Skrla

Amazon Description: Grounded solidly in theory and the use of data, this resource provides practical, easy-to-implement strategies for effectively using equity audits to ensure a high-quality education for all students, regardless of socio-economic class. Readers will discover how to increase equity awareness at school and district levels and remedy inequalities in teacher quality, program design, and student achievement by using:

• A set of "inequity indicators" for evaluating schools, generating essential data, and identifying problem areas

• Nine skill sets for improved equity-oriented teaching

• Charts, graphs, and support materials that can be customized for specific settings

By Bettina L. Love

Amazon Description: Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.

By Paul Tough

Amazon Description: Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but also of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, this is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.

By Beverly Daniel Tatum

Amazon Description: Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? How can we get past our reluctance to discuss racial issues? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about communicating across racial and ethnic divides and pursuing antiracism. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand dynamics of race and racial inequality in America.