This post is a little late.  Sorry for the handful of you who actually read my reviews.  I read a lot in July, but only managed to finish two books.  Fortunately they were both quite good.  One is a fine collection of poems and the other a history of education in America.

• New and Selected Poems (1992) by Mary Oliver is a solid selection of poems from the early career of a great poet.  I picked up this collection years ago because a friend of mine told me he really liked Oliver’s poetry, but it languished on my shelf.  More recently, someone shared “Wild Geese” on Facebook and I realized I had to read more of her poetry after coming across lines like “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on.”  I discovered many more poems I liked as well or better as that one, from an early poem about Theseus and the Minotaur to the many nature poems later.  Interestingly, this collection puts the poems in reverse chronological order, starting with the newest ones first and going backwards to the earliest poems.  I liked being able to track the growth and changes in a poet in a collection like this that spans more than 25 years.  There’s something similar in a collection like this to a greatest hits package for a musical artist versus going through a back catalog album by album.  Sometimes I prefer to experience an individual album (or poetry collection) and see it as a whole unit.  But sometimes an artist’s offerings lend themselves to selections plucked from the field and placed in their own vase to be admired as their own bouquet.  This set of wildflowers are beautiful.

• The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein is a helpful and even-handed look at education in America.  By tracing the history of teaching, Goldstein is able to show how many ideas that seem new have been tried in the past as the country continually tries to improve our educational system.  For instance, ideas like merit pay and complex teacher evaluations have been used in the past without seeing much improvement.  Merit pay has been tried numerous times in the past 100 years, but the programs failed because of “excessive administrative paperwork, low funding, disagreement about how to judge good teaching, and strong opposition from teachers themselves” (174).  Merit pay programs were often implemented as a way to cut overall teacher pay.  Too often the programs pit teachers against each other, causing acrimony instead of harmony.  Teaching should be a collaborative job, where teachers mentor each other and share materials that work.  But most merit pay systems only reward a few top teachers, creating an incentive not to work together.  The chapters each focus on a different time period or type of reform from the first common schools to the beginning of teachers unions to our own day of high stakes testing and charter schools and programs like Teach for America.  Goldstein attempts to give the history straight, showing what teaching was like at the time and how it changed over time.  But she does interject with what the research shows, like when she points out in a discussion about teacher quality (a current hot topic in school reform discussions) that “the current achievement gap is driven much more by out-of-school factors than by in-school factors” and that teacher quality differences amount to about seven percent of the equation.  She withholds her own policy prescriptions for the end, where she recommends some commonsense ideas like focusing on principals as much as teachers because the work environment matters, or that testing is more useful as a diagnostic tool to let teachers know what they need to teach to students, not as a tool to evaluate the teachers themselves.  Above all, teachers should be part of the equation whenever it comes to reform projects because they are the ones doing the job.  Too often, outsiders with business experience or some philanthropist tries to impose strictures on teachers without their input.  This is a useful book for anyone who is invested in the public education of the children of our country, which is basically everyone.