Carefully considered treatment of a troubling subject that will be particularly useful to educators and policymakers.
An NPR reporter tackles the often overlooked American illiteracy problem through the stories of three students and one very troubled school system.
For 23-year-old Yamilka, illiteracy was literally crippling. Because she couldn’t perform basic cashier’s tasks, figure out her medication or even read the subway signs, she was essentially captive in her Bronx home. Astoundingly, Yamilka is a high-school graduate with a diploma in hand from the New York City public-school system. Her brother, Alejandro, and another student, Antonio, had similar experiences. All had learning disabilities that went undiagnosed or untreated for years, and all three were raised in Spanish-speaking families by parents who didn’t know how to advocate for them during their schooling. In many ways, these are still remarkable cases. Fertig found them because they had all legally challenged the school system for their illiteracy and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in private tutoring—it’s terrifying to think that there are many other students in similar situations who haven’t gone to such lengths to rectify their situation. The author’s chronicle of their private education gives fascinating insight into what went wrong in their public education. With enough time and attention from professionals who went to great lengths to figure out how they learned, each student became functional if not avid readers. Fertig tries to reconcile these methods with the problems facing the NYC public-school system, and emerges with a surprisingly optimistic look at the future of education. While large urban school systems will never have the resources that private tutors were able to give to these three students, both Mayor Bloomberg’s improvements to the NYC public-school system and the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act offer hope that at least the situation may soon become less dire.
Carefully considered treatment of a troubling subject that will be particularly useful to educators and policymakers.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-29905-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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