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School Books: in Brief

Posted on: Thursday, 6 October 2005, 06:00 CDT

By Anonymous

SCHOOL BOOKS: IN BRIEF

The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, by Jonathan Kozol (Crown, $25). The author spent several years visiting with students and teachers in more than 60 public schools throughout the country. He found that Black and Hispanic children attend schools that are more segregated today than at any point in the last 40 years. Minority children, he observed, are subjected to "a protomilitary form of discipline" and their classes, rather than being vibrant learning environments are robotic ones where teachers perpetually prep them for standardized tests.

Keepin' it Real: School Success Beyond Black and White, by Prudence L Carter (Oxford University Press, $29.95). The author contends that school success has no color. Students generally believe in education and desire the benefits it yields-, the problem, she argues, is that "both school officials' and minority students' failure to reconcile their differences - dominant cultural expectations for achievement with non-dominant students' cultural styles, tastes, and displeasure in what school curricula provide them - facilitates, in part, the students' limited attachment to school and their academic disengagement."

See You When We Get There: Teaching for Change in Urban Schools, by Gregory Michie (Teachers College Press, $18.95 paper). A look inside America's classrooms through the stories of five young teachers who work at Chicago public schools. They work in a variety of settings, including charter and magnet, elementary, middle and high schools. The author has selected dedicated teachers who believe "that public schools have too often failed poor children and children of color," but that with considerable effort, public schools "can become places of hope and possibility for all kids."

School Resegregation: Must The South Turn Back? edited by John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield (The University of North Carolina Press, $24.95 paper). Since the 1970s public school integration in the South surpassed other regions of the country. Today that is no longer the case. Thirteen essays by leading experts in the field of race and public education are collected here, examining the legal and demographic changes that, over the decades, have led to their racial and socioeconomic resegregation.

Recruiting, Retaining, and Supporting Highly Qualified Teachers, edited by Caroline Chauncey (Harvard Education Press, $19.95 paper). Faced with "the graying of the teaching force," increased student enrollment, high turnover among new teachers and the pressures of the No Child Left Behind Act, many school districts are struggling to maintain teacher quality. This collection of essays offers practical solutions for principals and administrators, or anyone else interested in improving classroom standards.

Urban School Reform: Lessons From San Diego, edited by Frederick M. Hess (Harvard Education Press, $29.95 paper). In 1998, Alan Bersin, a former U.S. attorney, was named superintendent of San Diego City Schools and promptly implemented a drastic reform plan. At the time, only 45 percent of the students performed at the national average in math on the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-9) and just 27 percent of Black students scored at the national level in reading. More than half of the students in the district qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and nearly 30 percent are non- native English speakers. Here, in essays written in 2004, scholars, educators and journalists examine specific aspects of the ongoing reform effort.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Sep/Oct 2005

Source: New Crisis, The

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