In a world where there are hundreds of high-quality research-based books on education, thousands of academic studies on education, dozens of books on the history of education, etc., these sorts of baseless opinion pieces get boring really quickly.
Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement - Research on variables effecting achievement. The only book in this list I haven't read yet, but it's slightly newer that the Riordan book above and it has good reviews so it's probably worth checking out. IIRC tokenadult recommends it also. The only caveat is I'm not sure how it deals with the research that Ravitch is critiquing, so maybe read it after that one.
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children - Basically a book-length academic journal article on why the amount of language spoken to children is the most important variable effecting their later academic ability. A very good read.
Life and Death of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch -- Exposing the fraudulent nature of the research behind Bill Gates' education reforms. The second half of the book is especially good, the first half is mostly about the history of failed school reforms by corporate leaders, which is interesting but kind of dry. Not only is it a must-read, but it's also very much worth going through all the footnotes and reading through the actual methodology of all the studies she's talking about. It's pretty ridiculous, and pretty much exposes Bill Gates as a complete mouth breather.
Anyway reading any of these books will be pretty much like dropping acid; you're going to come back a different person, probably for the better, but don't ask me to predict how.
The electronic version of this book How People Learn can be downloaded for free: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853
See also "What Technologists and Entrepreneurs Should Know about Education": http://guide.hackeducation.com/techies.html
I can't fathom why something so dumb, which clearly has nothing worthwhile to say and doesn't even bring up any interesting topics, made it to the front page.