"Common Sense School Reform delivers exactly what it promises: a no-holds-barred, sensible approach to school reform, stripped bare of the utopian rhetoric and pie-in-the-sky promises that so many school reformers prefer. School leaders should read this book!" --Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police and Research Professor, New York University
"This is a refreshingly direct and stimulating look at competing visions of educational reform and a passionate argument for radical change. Informed by Hess' experience as a teacher, teacher educator, and scholar, this book will help crystallize key disputes while it unapologetically calls some questionable assumptions out into the open for debate." --Andrew J. Rotherham, Director, 21st Century Schools Project, Progressive Policy Institute
"[Hess'] ideas on how to improve schools are welcome relief from the romantics and ideologues who dominate the national education debate." --Tom Loveless, Senior Fellow and Director, Brown Center on Education Policy, Brookings Institution
"Rick Hess has brought a rare intellectual gift to the subject of school reform: plain common sense. He knows American education, he knows how effective organizations work, and that knowledge has shaped a radical vision of the fundamental structural change that real school improvement demands. Common Sense School Reform is a gem. It should become a handbook for all who are seriously committed to educating America's children." --Abigail Thernstrom, co-author, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning
"Common Sense School Reform prescribes with unblinking realism what must happen for public education to give children the education they need instead of adults the employment they want. This is a book no one concerned with American education should miss. Absent common sense reforms, urban public education as we know it today is bound to disappear." --Alan D. Bersin, Secretary of Education for the State of California
"An important contribution that will challenge school reformers." --Ronald F. Ferguson, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
"With an insider's knowledge, and an outsider's vantage point, Hess questions old assumptions and prods the conventional wisdom on school reform. His arguments for radical change may leave some feeling uncomfortable, but you needn't agree with all of his characterizations to find his provocative observations an important contribution to the dialogue on public school improvement." --Kim Smith, Co-Founder and CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund
." . . he is a forceful and effective writer whose views challenge the education establishment. A parent or teacher who wants to know why our schools are in such bad shape should find 'Common Sense School Reform' an excellent guide to the problems that American education faces today." --Martin Morse Wooster, Sunday Times
