A good case, if one largely of interest to educational policymakers and activists.
Want to build the middle class? Then keep 13-year-olds from falling through the cracks and failing high school.
Phillips, a former education reporter who works at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, chronicles that group’s Freshmen OnTrack program, which works throughout the city’s school system to foster retention of at-risk students. In an opening case study, she highlights a Latino boy who, having been rejected for a “selective enrollment” public school, entered a school that would not challenge him and quietly began to fade away. For decades, Phillips notes, a child entering Chicago’s public school system had roughly the same chance of dropping out as graduating, and at tremendous social cost—for, she adds, “if ninth grade is the make-or-break year for high school graduation, then it is also the pivotal year for a shot at the middle class.” That’s of material interest, for over a lifetime of earning, a high school graduate will bring in about $670,000 more than a high school dropout, and that means more tax revenue for municipalities, states, and even the national government. Performance in ninth grade turns out to be predictive but by no means irreversible, and programs like OnTrack are meant not just to help students adjust to the rigors of schoolwork, but also to form connections to school and cohort by such means as peer mentoring. Naturally, school administrations are all about numbers and testing, and the OnTrack program doesn’t neatly fit with some of those aims and perhaps even some of the aims of the children themselves. As one high school principal says, “We want to be on-track because we want to change outcomes for kids…a kid doesn’t give a shit if they are on track.” Phillips makes it clear that changing outcomes is reason enough to keep the program alive—and to see it replicated elsewhere.
A good case, if one largely of interest to educational policymakers and activists.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62097-323-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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