A bittersweet tale of dreams unrealized.
Former public school teacher and journalist Schorr gives a grim report of two California charter schools he observed for three years following their inception.
Oakland parents weren’t asking for much: they wanted their children to get a decent education in their neighborhood public schools. Exasperated by the local school board’s hostility to reform, a coalition of parents and churches known as the OCO proposed a charter school (an independent public school exempt from bureaucracy and mandated to get results or be shut down) in partnership with School Futures, a pro-voucher group financed with Wal-Mart money. In 1999, the Oakland Board of Education voted to approve five OCO-School Futures charters—for the school year beginning in less than five months. Three of the five schools never even reached the planning stages. The two that did open were beset with problems. Schorr carefully layers the views of teachers, parents, and students at the Dolores Huerta Learning Academy and the E.C. Reems Academy of Technology and Art (a facility with neither computers nor art classes). Both schools suffered most seriously from the fact that School Futures repeatedly hired unqualified principals without checking their credentials. E.C. Reems principal Laura Armstrong, a former fourth-grade teacher, had no experience as an administrator. Her lack of skills combined with a combative personality made her incapable of motivating her teachers, most of whom she recruited through word-of-mouth at the local beauty parlor. When Armstrong was fired, School Futures hired a man dismissed from previous posts because of charges of sexual harassment and misuse of funds. The principal of Dolores Huerta was also a poor choice: seemingly unstable and so sidetracked by minutiae like the color of the school floor tiles that she nearly failed to hire an adequate number of teachers. (She was also fired.) The children ultimately paid the price for this disaster: standardized tests showed only seven percent of E.C. Reems fourth-grade students reading at grade level.
A bittersweet tale of dreams unrealized.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44702-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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