- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition (Aug 27 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0345447026
- ISBN-13: 978-0345447029
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.3 x 3.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 544 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,065,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
For three years, Schorr trailed parents, teachers and students as they struggled to establish the E.C. Reems Academy in one of Oakland, Calif.'s poorest neighborhoods. Beginning with community outrage over graffiti-decorated, rat-infested trailers masquerading as classrooms, Schorr (formerly an urban public school teacher) chronicles their bureaucratic wrangling, search for a principal, building renovation and discipline problems in exhaustive detail. The scope of this investigation is admirable, particularly its even-handed treatment of School Futures, an idealistic and highly political organization that helps set up charter schools. However, Schorr's attention to detail gets tiresome. Why, for instance, is it relevant that teacher Valentin Del Rio arose at 5:27 a.m. "an odd number he arrived at by pressing the `fast' button on his digital clock" on the first day of school? Despite such fastidious reporting, Schorr never manages to breathe life into his one-dimensional subjects. The result is a useful handbook for parents and educators undertaking the Herculean task of building a viable charter school. But given Schorr's distant and somewhat preachy tone, it seems unlikely that this account will appeal to readers outside the academic world.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Starting with the critical experiences of public schooling 40 years ago, every generation has needed its own storytellers to record America's chronic inability to create just schools for deserving communities. Following the model of such empathic and articulate eyewitnesses as George Dennison and Jonathan Kozol, Schorr provides highly detailed observations of an Oakland charter school, the E. C. Reems Academy. Like all educational stories, this one has the essential mix of ingredients. The human players compose an unstable cast of invested folks: diverse kids, inexperienced teachers, anxious parents, tense administrators, and politicized community observers. Surrounding factors make up an entire record of the social issues and aspirations that affect such ventures: low school achievement, recent immigrant populations, homeless families, poor materials, and the cultural marginality of education as a priority. The result is a story that measures out hope in teaspoons, and frustration by the cup. Schorr is a warm and graceful writer with all of the right sensitivities for perceiving this mix and understanding its ambiguities. David Carr
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Education Story With Lessons Beyond Education, Oct 28 2009
By Caroline@SixFigureStart.com - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Hard Lessons: The Promise of an Inner City Charter School (Hardcover)
I always like reading about industries unfamiliar to me firsthand because success and obstacles have common threads across industries, and looking from the outside in often gives a perspective that is tough to see when you're waist deep in immediate issues. Jonathan Schorr's Hard Lessons is a play-by-play of Oakland's struggle to open charter schools in the inner city. Told from multiple points of view -- teacher, student, parent, administration -- it's a fascinating story but also a good coaching book. Some lessons from Hard Lessons:Progress can take a while. Schorr spends time describing the difficult start-up phase before and after the charter schools opened. You can feel how slow and seemingly hopeless the circumstances were. Yet, because we can see the fruits of plowing through the difficulty, we get the benefit (without the interminable wait) of hindsight and the encouragement that we too can prevail if we want something as badly as some of those parents wanted a good education for their kids.
But just because we push doesn't mean we have to rush. Some of the biggest problems came when decisions were rushed -- hiring calls where no references were checked, teachers using an approach without training and therefore digging a deeper hole for themselves. There are numerous examples of haste makes waste here. It reminds us that even when we want to move things forward, we shouldn't push things.
Sometimes you need to reconsider options you earlier might have dismissed. The parents who lobbied so hard against the district schools later aligned themselves with the district when a new administration came in. Great lesson on how we shouldn't be afraid to go back, reassess, and perhaps move in a direction that was not ideal before. Our circumstances change, and we should always adjust for what's best now, even if that means doing something deemed less than ideal before.
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