About government, that is. Check out his Forbes.com piece, “Our Government, For Better Or Worse.” Here’s his thesis:

Ever since I came into contact with government, both state and federal, and especially in the four decades since first going to work in it, I’ve been struck by the gap between what many Americans expect of government and what it’s actually good at doing.

And the heart of his argument:

Government, in short, has enormous difficulty fulfilling its current responsibilities, coordinating its various parts and accomplishing its present objectives. You don’t have to romanticize the private sector’s competence to harbor serious doubts that giving government even more duties is a formula for disappointment.

Interested in learning more about amazing “no excuses” schools that are changing the lives of disadvantaged students? David Brooks raves about these schools in his recent column and recommends some relevant reading material–including David Whitman’s Sweating the Small Stuff, which Brooks praises as “a superb survey of these sorts of schools.” Congrats to Mr. Whitman! We couldn’t agree more (OK, yes, we published the book). Check it out. The other book Brooks recommends?  Whatever It Takes, by Paul Tough. He calls it a “gripping account” of Harlem Children’s Zone (which is the subject of much of his column).

And the praise just keeps on coming. Joel Klein mentions Sweating the Small Stuff in a recent column that he wrote as well. Check it out here.

Pedro Noguera attacks David Whitman’s book, published by Fordham last year, in this post on Gotham Schools:

I reject the notion that there’s one way to educate poor kids or the idea put forward by David Whitman that you must treat their culture as a problem. I also reject the idea that schools should focus narrowly on achievement and ignore the other needs – social, emotional, etc. PS 28 does it all with a high-need population and even though children do not walk the halls in silence they still receive a good education. 

Whitman responds:

Philissa Cramer and Pedro Noguera roundly misconstrue the message of my book, Sweating the Small Stuff. I never suggest or argue that KIPP and other secondary schools that I describe as examples of the “new paternalism” are imposing alien values on disadvantaged students…. On p.35, I address the question head-on of whether the new paternalist schools impose alien “middle-class” values on their students. Here is what I wrote: “Paternalistic programs, including paternalistic schools, survive only because they typically enforce values that ‘clients already believe,’ [Lawrence] Mead [the editor of a 1997 Brookings volume] notes. Rare is the parent who thinks it is a good idea for their child to be disruptive or do poorly in school. But many paternalistic programs remain controversial because they seek to change the lifestyles of the poor, immigrants, and minorities, rather than the lifestyles of middle-class and upper-class families. The paternalistic presumption, implicit in the schools portrayed here, is that the poor lack the family and community support, cultural capital, and personal follow-through to live according to the middle-class values that they, too, espouse.”

KIPP and the other “new paternalist” schools I wrote about are highly-prescriptive schools; they care not only about academics but about building character by cultivating traits like self-discipline, perseverance, the ability to plan ahead, and politeness. Conservatives would say that these schools are cultivating traditional virtues. Liberals–and most of the schools I wrote about are founded by liberals–would argue that the schools are building up the “non-cognitive” skills that will allow students to persist in college and succeed in the workplace. The latter position has been staked out by liberal luminaries like Christopher Jencks, James Heckman, and Richard Rothstein, a point that I explicitly make in my book.

I imagine that Pedro Noguerra agrees that high-performing schools for low-income students do tend to build these “non-cognitive” skills in students. But my book does not contend that educators must treat the culture of poor kids as the problem. I argue that paternalistic programs only work when they are in accordance with people’s values, even if low-income families sometimes lack the resources and support to act upon those values.

Not everyone misreads Whitman’s arguments; take a look at this excellent new review from CommonWealth and this nice write-up of a recent Harvard forum about the book.

Read more about our new Advanced Placement Program report in this piece in the New York Times. The author, Jacques Steinberg, also has started a lively discussion on the NYT college admission blog, The Choice. Readers are welcomed to join in and share their thoughts!

And…..our AP report is being highlighted by Education Week as well. Check out the story here.