the railroad. there are also persons that are very important to our task which leave us a legacy for future generations to be able to remember them by. there's also engineering significance, the construction or the aid that was went in theconstruction by the japanese , that's an often overlooked aspect so we have to look at what a story like the development of the tacoma eastern house to teach us in the future. and i believe that the book does a very good job in being able to lay out that this was an important and significant railroad not only to tacoma but to the region as well. >> next from our trip to tacoma, university of washington tacoma economics professor catherine baird offers her thoughts on the state of the us education system. >> the name of the book is

trapped in mediocrity. and i wrote this book kind of two influences. it kind of came together, one is my workas a scholar . so i do research on education policy and i'm particularly interested in the degree to which our education system creates a level playing field . towards our education system is to do is create a level playing field and my research is, looks at policy from the point of view of the degree to which our education system creates a level playing field. i've gotten to think about our education system and led me to lots of conversations with people trying to figure out some of these oddities and why there seem to be a lot of entrenched unfairness in the way that education was delivered. unfairness that advantaged

people like me but not people who i thought were more in need of an excellent education. and so through a long period, probably three or four years thinking about education and reading and talking to people and reading outside of the economics literature, a few themes emerged in my mind as ways of explaining our education system and so my purpose in the book is really to bring these concepts to a lay audience and to explain our education system in a way that i hope that people can understand. the underlying theme is that this is where the title track in mediocrity comes from is that our education system has low standards and has low

standards by just about any way that you measure standards in education. that's not particular controversial. i don't know that there's any wrong advocates saying that we have an excellent school system. we have pockets of excellence but as a whole it's not excellent. we have low standards, or performance overall. and that the institutional aspects of our education system serve, conspired to keeping our standards low. in other words, we are trapped. that's where the track comes from. the history of our education system is actually a real success so go back to my grandfather who was born in 1889. and he got an eighth grade education. it which was typical of his generation. you would, wouldn't go on to high school. your education was what today we call middle school and high school was, there was

about 10 percent of the population went on to high school. high school was designed to be training for college. and so high school, you took latin. you took greek, you took kind of a classical education. and so starting in 1920, the industrialization and urbanization there became greater demand for more education because more education started to have more of an economic impact so our high schools opened up to a lot more of the population started going ties school. i think by 1940 it was something like 40 percent of the population went to high school and thennowadays , everybody, almost 100 percent, at least start high school. they don't necessarily finish but they at least high

school. this is one of the success stories is that we the united states is really at the forefront of this opening up to mass education. you think about well, how do you get what happens at the school level or within a classroom to change? let's say you want kids to have a better education. you've got to think about what's the policy to level that you can change to affect that? when the systems are what sociologists call and i call in my book whose couplings, they are loosely connected. the federal government if it wants to do something it's not translated down to the school level. it's at the classroom level because each of those entities has a lot of the economy. they have all sorts of ways

to not comply or to comply in a way that appears they are complying but they are really not. so this is a quick example of that. think of the no child left behind at the federal level that was passed by president bush in 2001. that was an effort by the federal government to tell states, you have to have , articulate what your standards are for your grades three through 10. if they articulate what you are expecting to learn, and then you have to demonstrate to us that the kids have actually learned those things you want them to learn. that was the essence of what no child left behind was. set standards and then tell us, proved to us that you've met those standards. so if you know anything about no child left behind, you know that just about everybody in education hated it.

so there's a tremendous amount of resistance to this. some people were actually quite like no child left behind and even if you liked it, you will find that the implementation was extremely problematic. so there's a lot of resistance. there's a lot of ways that people got around it. so they gamed the system and a lot of those ways that people gained the system was really perverse so a lot of what states did in response to the federal government telling them you have to set standards and you have to show that you met those standards is they simply lowered their standards. just which is exactly the opposite of what you want to have happen. that tells you the degree of conflict and the difficulty of getting things done because the system is not well coordinated and is not,

it's really not a coherence system for providing quality education for kids . kinda well, what else can we do? i think we what we see is the common core. what states have done is they are all trying to adopt independently a similar standard called common core standards and if allstate adopted that, essentially you would have national standards . they only achieve that by each state signing on so that has been a way of getting away from the top hand of the federal government and the states saying hey, let's see if we can fix this together if we all just kind of collaborate on that so that i think explains where the common core came from and

that now is having its own backlash and caught up in education which is kind of the history of education policy which is whatever new idea comes down, any citizen who gets caught up in often ideological wars and lost in all of that is the education of our kids.what does a good educationalsystem look like ? i would say a good educational system is one where the central level in our country, the federal government, you have set curriculum. you set standards and you finance your schools because you can't do one, set standards and curriculum unless you're going to finance it. you have to do both and that's what our federal government should be doing. it should be doing those things and then i'm sorry. you should also be finding

out the degree to which they require acquiring the skills and knowledge is that you want them to acquire so you know that. and then you just let schools educate kids because schools are the ones that can do that. and the federal government or anybody shouldn't be too overly prescriptive and how you do that. but you set standards, you make it clear. you give them the resources. you give it schools the resources they need and you hold them accountable. and you hold them accountable by allowing parents to have multiple options for their kids. different school they can go to if they're not happy with the ones that their kids go to. so that's what a good school system looks like, where you give school level autonomy and you have central financing and standards.

i think there's a growing consensus around the world actually that's the model that works and you see this now. you see lots of different countries taking on reform that looks a lot more like that. so there is this convergence slowly occurring where that occurs. then the question is how do we do that in the united states? that's your question. that really is difficult because it's so different from what we have and i think the best chance we have are some experiments. you have some experiments where you demonstrate the potential for different models to be effective to la people's fears. you kind of get over some of the education wars that we have and a lot of it is just based on rhetoric and not based on outcomes.

so you could have some experiments as for example has been done in england where the federal government maybe announces some initiative where they are going to start funding particular schools or school districts in exchange for giving those schools a lot of autonomy and england has done this and they started this kind of trial project and people are watching the results and their seeing this combination

. >> you are watching the tvon c-span2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. book tv: television for serious readers . >> book tv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer i'm reading bishop moved. i'm readingjames clapper's book , less experiences and i'm also reading about the life of corettascott king. my life, my love, my memory . >> what inspired these choices? coretta scott king is a great one. >> let me say this, it's been

that coretta was really in the movement as now, women in particular black women have never gotten the credit we should have gotten for what we did in the movement. women were very integral to the success of the civil rights movement but you never hear much about them. you hear about martin area did you hear about malcolm. but do you hear about coretta? do you hear about people like dorothy heights or mrs. lowden? i'm intrigued about the women behind these great men and the women who made the movement move so that's why the coretta book. this is by a pastor out of georgia whose talking about that we've gotten so complacent in our churches that we, this is how he explains it.we go to the same place every time.

even though the last few times we've been going, the fish are not there but we're still going and doing the same thing. maybe we have to go to deeper water be to find the fish because the fish have moved. it's important for me not just as a christian but as a leader to figure out how do i find the fish and not expect the fish to always be at the same place or to always come to me. and it just struck me as such a great read, very tiny book. but so powerful and impactful. we have to figure out how to go into the deeper waters and not be afraid to go out further. we want to stay out on the shore, sometimes you got to go in the deepwater. that's why that one. and then james clapper is my friend. i think he is probably one of the most intelligent people i've ever met. he's a great historian and he has great experiences so i wanted to get some understanding of who he is even as deeper as a person. what his childhood was like. why he became the man he is and that's why these three

books. >> most of these books are centered around history. is that where most of your interest and you find your inspiration from or do you have other genres that you are into? >> i am big on poetry. i'm big on pros. so let's say for instance i prepared to do a speech, the first thing i would do is start to read a poem. or something that strikes me. sometimes music. but mostly i love poetry. that's inspirational to me. this is inspirational in a different way. they inspire me to be the kind of peoplein these books , two measure myself against the successes of them. to know if i'm going in the right direction. sometimes you look at other people and say i'd like to have that trait. i'd like to be like this person and that's why i read this.

i'm a big-time historian, i love history. this just happens to be my summer reading historical kinds of books. >> book tv wants to know what you're reading. send us your summer reading list via twitter at book tv or instagram at bookótv or posted to our facebook page, facebook.com/book tv. book tv on c-span2: television for serious readers. >> c-span: where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. next on after words, connecticut representative rosa delauro talks about her coss