I agree with John that Charles Murray’s book looks excellent, but it will have a run for its money, I think, to be the year’s “must-read book on education.” Stanley Fish’s book, Save the World on Your Own Time, also comes out in August and sounds like a well-reasoned demand for rigor in higher education. From the description:

What should be the role of our institutions of higher education? To promote good moral character? To bring an end to racism, sexism, economic oppression, and other social ills? To foster diversity and democracy and produce responsible citizens? … Stanley Fish argues that, however laudable these goals might be, there is but one proper role for the academe in society: to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, or agents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the methods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose. … Fish argues that academic freedom, correctly understood, is the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to do any job that comes into the professor’s mind.