Education Progress
Donate
The CEP Manifesto · A call to action Schools Should Pursue Excellence “It’s time for No Child Kept Behind.”
Reading lists Our Education Reading List An ongoing map of useful efforts to address excellence within education. Reading List for Developing Readers Books that build what children know.
Collections 01Annual Collection of Essays The 2025–2026 edition 02Model Policies Recommendations · Policies · Position Papers 03Living Article Collection
Woodcut-style illustration in deep red and cream: black birds rising from the pages of an open book, framed by an ornamental printed border.

A living document

Our Education Reading List

An ongoing map of useful efforts to address excellence within education.

By Center for Educational Progress ·February 14, 2025

We are far from the first to focus on questions of excellence in education. For a long while, though, interest in these questions has been fractured: an insight from psychology here and one from economics there, whether from the odd autodidact blogger or a professional in a seemingly unrelated field… Still, these disparate investigations studying a single aspect of the path towards expertise often take the matter more seriously than the field of education itself does.

Here follows a reading list that attempts to triangulate, using these fragments, something like a baseline of common knowledge. Our ongoing goal is to build a corpus for ambitious educators and learners to work from.

For now, we exclude some critical topics altogether and touch on others more briefly than they deserve. This list is idiosyncratic by design. It is not complete comprehensive: its immediate goal is to be useful: to point towards a particular intersection, neglected within the mainstream of education, that demands more examination.

This reading list is a living document. As we find relevant books, research papers, case studies, and essays, we will add them to the list. Please send recommendations for sources you’ve found especially inspiring to contact@educationprogress.org.

Finally, the presence of an item on this list is not an endorsement of its methodology or conclusions. (Nor could it be, since the different works don’t cohere.) Rather, it is an endorsement of the work’s importance and relevance for thinking about questions of excellence in education today.

Theory

Painting a Vision

Systemic Critiques

  • EssayEducation Doesn't Workby Freddie deBoerdeBoer argues that no intervention has been found that can meaningfully change the rank order of students relative to their peers.
  • BookThe Case Against Educationby Bryan CaplanCaplan argues that most education is a massive, wasteful signaling tournament where students jump through hoops to prove they're smart, conscientious, and conformist enough to be good employees. What should we do, per Caplan? Dramatically reduce public funding for education.

Policy History

  • ReportMoney and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experimentby Paul CiottiIn 1985, a judge ordered the Kansas City, Missouri school district to massively increase its spending with a focus on desegregation and closing the ability gap. After more than a decade and three Supreme Court rulings, the experiment failed in most measurable ways.
  • PaperProject Follow Through: A Case Studyby Cathy L. WatkinsProject Follow Through was the largest and most expensive education experiment funded by the US government. Of the curricula tried, only one (Direct Instruction) was found to meaningfully move the needle. The results of the study were almost completely ignored in practice and in funding. See also Zach Groshell’s podcast summary.
  • ReportMaking Sense of the Tracking and Ability Grouping Debateby Tom LovelessAn excellent overview of one of the most heated disputes in education: should students be placed on distinct “tracks” based on demonstrated level? He examines facially contradictory meta-analyses, ultimately concluding that so long as you accept as legitimate the studies of academically enriched and accelerated programs, tracking unambiguously helps high achievers.

Early Childhood Development and Education

  • BookRaise a Genius!by László PolgárThe quintessential early childhood training text. Polgár’s theories were incomplete and at times eccentric, but he called his shots, devoting his life to raising chess prodigies and succeeding.
  • EssayHow and Why I Taught My Toddler to Readby Larry SangerWhat of more fundamental skills? Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger outlines the process by which he taught his two-year-old son to read. Erik Hoel has a series of blog posts following much the same sequence.
  • BookBattle Hymn of the Tiger Motherby Amy ChuaBattle Hymn did more than almost any other book to focus conversations on the pursuit of excellence in child-rearing and the question of what it looks like, as Chua outlined just how high she kept childhood standards for her kids and why.
  • BookThe Scientist in the Cribby Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. KuhlGopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl examine early developmental research to conclude that infants are sophisticated Bayesian learners, running controlled experiments through play and updating probability distributions about physics, language, and minds. Rigorous overview of the cognitive science of early childhood.
  • PaperEducating the Evolved Mindby David GearyRare in the field of ed, Geary appropriately treats humans as evolutionary creatures, and explores the mismatch between evolved cognitive systems and modern educational demands, arguing for curricula that align with innate learning mechanisms (e.g., play-based learning for young children, explicit instruction for secondary skills like literacy).

The Science of Learning

  • BookThe Math Academy Wayby Justin SkycakA layman’s overview of the state-of-the-art in learning research. Skycak, who formerly ran one of the most advanced math/CS tracks in the country (culminating in students doing graduate-level coursework), outlines what effective learning looks like from the ground up.
  • PaperTeaching the Science of Learningby Yana Weinstein, Christopher R. Madan and Megan A. SumerackiA quick, effective literature review of six robustly supported cognitive strategies–spaced practice, interleaving, retrieval practice, elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding.
  • PaperCreating Desirable Difficulties To Enhance Learningby Elizabeth L. Bjork and Robert BjorkBjork and Bjork are the rarest sort of education researchers: rigorous, empirically focused, and insightful. This chapter provides a summary of some of their key findings, focused on the point that much of what works in instruction is unintuitive and even frustrating in the moment.
  • BookWhen Can You Trust the Experts?by Daniel WillinghamA skeptically-minded education researcher’s overview of education research, written for parents and educators.
  • PaperWhy Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Workby Paul A. Kirschner, John Sweller & Richard E. ClarkKirschner, Sweller, and Clark make the case that minimally guided instruction, despite strong intuitive appeal, ignores the reality of human cognition and half a century of empirical evidence demonstrating that it is less effective than more directly guided instruction.

Expertise

  • BookPeak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertiseby K. Anders EricssonEricsson did more to advance the empirical study of expertise than, realistically, anyone else. Peak is his layman’s summary of his work, starting from his description of his research on digit span, and winding through the cognitive differences between novices and experts, developments that can only happen during early childhood, and many more of his ideas.
  • PaperIs the Deliberate Practice View Defensible? A Review of Evidence and Discussion of Issuesby David Z. Hambrick, Brooke N. Macnamara, and Frederick L. OswaldHambrick et al. agree with Ericsson that expertise is acquired gradually and massive domain-specific gains are possible, but note serious issues with the idea that deliberate practice is sufficient to explain gaps between individuals and inconsistencies in the definition of deliberate practice across time.
  • BookMoonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everythingby Joshua FoerA journalist practices memory skills for a year while learning from the best mnemonists in the United States. Oriented towards a popular audience, but does an excellent job painting a vision of what is possible with focused training.
  • PaperThe Mundanity of Excellenceby Daniel F. ChamblissAfter examining competitive swimmers, Chambliss argues that Olympic excellence arises from an accumulation of small qualitative improvements—refined techniques, disciplined habits, and consistent, incremental actions—rather than innate talent or sheer effort, with swimmers at different levels occupying distinct “worlds” that direct them towards fundamentally different goals.
  • BookDeveloping Talent In Young Peopleby Benjamin BloomBloom, a leading educational psychologist, studied 120 experts across six disciplines (swimmers, sculptors, concert pianists, tennis players, research mathematicians, and research neurologists), examining their childhood training and the processes along which their talents developed.

Teaching outlier children: Acceleration, ability grouping, and gifted research

Tests and Testing

  • EssayYou Aren't Actually Mad at the SATsby Freddie deBoerRebuts five myths about tests: that SAT/ACT don’t predict college success, that the SAT only tells you how well a student takes the SAT, that the SAT just replicates the income distribution, that the SAT is easily gamed with expensive tutoring, and that going test optional increases racial diversity.
  • ReportReport of the UC Academic Council Standardized Testing Task ForceThe University of California system commissioned a detailed report when deciding whether to drop standardized tests in admissions. Results: “Standardized test scores aid in predicting important aspects of student success, including undergraduate grade point average (UGPA), retention, and completion. … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority students (URMs), who are first-generation, or whose families are low-income...”
  • BookThe g Factorby Arthur JensenSeminal work on psychometrics. Provides a thorough, informed overview of the background logic behind standardized tests and intelligence research.
  • BookWhat Is Intelligence?by James FlynnA carefully researched perspective on IQ gains through the twentieth century, and what they say about the nature of intelligence and the relation of IQ tests to it.

Practice

This section highlights particular schools and programs. It remains embryonic. As we move forward and examine more curricula and schools, we will steadily expand to include the best or most interesting options.

School Case Studies

Curricula and Specific Resources

Mathematics

  • CurriculumArt of Problem SolvingArt of Problem Solving is the undisputed champion in mathematics education for outlier students. Virtually every Math Olympiad winner trains using its curriculum. It offers rigorous, comprehensive education focused on problem-solving skills and competition math, including both textbooks and a free online tool.
  • CurriculumMath AcademyMath Academy is what happens when an edtech project takes the science of learning seriously in every part of its design. It maps out the structure of math from elementary school to university-level topics, then pulls students through every stage of that structure starting with a diagnostic test and carrying on with rigorous training targeted at every gap in student understanding as efficiently as possible.

Reading

Training narrow skills

This section will grow. Right now, we imagine compiling resources for various specific skills that are time-sensitive for children to learn. This is both practically useful and helps us understand nature-nurture effects in skill formation and distribution better. An example of such a skill is musical pitch:

Absolute Pitch
  • EssayAbsolute Pitchby Diana DeutschDeutsch, a psychologist at UC San Diego who has absolute pitch herself, argues that the real puzzle is not why some people have it but why so few do. She reviews evidence that it is learned during a critical period in early childhood, much like language: in one large survey, 40% of people who began music lessons before age 4 reported having absolute pitch, compared with 3% of those who began after age 9.
  • StudyA longitudinal study of the process of acquiring absolute pitch“Twenty-four young children (aged 2 to 6 years) without AP were trained to acquire AP using Eguchi’s (1991) Chord Identification Method (CIM). All children were able to acquire AP (except two who ceased training). Results suggest that, at a minimum, children younger than 6 years old are capable of acquiring AP through intentional training.”
  • WebsitePerfect Pitch Program: Eguchi MethodUnfortunately, English-language resources diving into the Eguchi method in detail are somewhat limited. The approach is more common in Japan; this page provides an overview.

Note: Many musicians report some skepticism about the value of absolute pitch, pointing out for example that it can turn “sour” with age, making everything sound a bit out of tune. That it can be acquired does not mean it must be acquired, but it’s crucial to understand that it is learnable, not innate.

We present this list as a start to the conversation around excellence, not its conclusion. There’s plenty more ground to cover and other domains worth considering—in particular, prodding deeper at questions like “What does excellence look like for instruction tailored at the average or struggling student?”, examining successful systems from around the world, or investigating how excellence manifests in domains beyond the purely academic. If you have suggestions for refinement, additions, or critiques, please send them to contact@educationprogress.org.