An outside-the-box approach to meeting students’ needs gets a worthy and forceful advocate.
A reformer argues for changes to the special education system.
In this policy book, Hettleman (It’s the Classroom, Stupid, 2010) contends that the majority of students currently in special education programs are being shortchanged by a system that disregards the original intent of state and federal laws. The author asserts that they would be better served by “Response to Intervention,” a framework that combines early diagnosis of learning impairments with short-term additional instruction to students who remain in a standard classroom. Drawing on both research and personal experience as an advocate for pupils while serving on the Baltimore school board, Hettleman makes an impassioned argument (“the purgatory of general education or the hell of special education”) on behalf of the students he calls “Mainly Mislabeled”—to distinguish them from the “Truly Disabled.” The latter have severe cognitive disabilities and benefit from traditional special education. In this volume, the author lays out a cogent case for making changes to the system. Empirical studies are blended with anecdotes from Hettleman’s professional experience to present both a big picture view of the problem and specific instances of how the education system fails students, especially those at a socio-economic disadvantage. The author frequently reminds readers that his quarrel is with the educational establishment and bureaucracy, not with teachers as individuals. Some of his suggestions, like the elimination of local school boards (“The business of K-12 schooling is simply too complicated for very part-time volunteer policy-makers”), are fundamental challenges to the status quo. The book’s solutions include expanded and updated teacher training, centralized systems for curriculum development and instructional methods, and learning plans that include specific measurable goals for all students. In addition, Hettleman offers a cleareyed assessment of the political realities reformers face. The concluding chapters deliver useful guidance for parents advocating for their own children and for activists working on broader education reform. An extensive notes section provides both citations and further discussion. The work’s conversational tone and the author’s evident enthusiasm for the subject make it an easy read for those not well versed in education policy.
An outside-the-box approach to meeting students’ needs gets a worthy and forceful advocate.Pub Date: March 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63576-639-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A somewhat fictionalized account of Minahan's semester at Brown ``in the early 1980's.'' There, as an adjunct lecturer, he taught a writing course called ``Democracy and Education,'' in which students discussed texts from the Declaration of Independence to the writings of E.D. Hirsch, and subjects from race, class, and gender to the ills of society. The students here are composites—allegorical types: the lazy, the passionate, the idealistic, the methodical, the manipulative, the arrogant, the silent; Ray, Toshiro, Pete, Rahjiv, Helga, and Juanita—the sort of cultural array that admissions officers fantasize about. Meanwhile, Minahan is critical of contemporary ideology; of political correctness, as well as of the DWM (dead white male) curriculum; of the cultural poverty of ``American education'' and ``college students today'' (who don't know Latin or the meaning of ``transcendentalism''); of a system that hires black women without Ph.D.s while he's unemployed (``Shit''); and of the ultimate disease—greed—the ``American illness'' perpetuated on campuses. But he likes his own students, plus Allan Bloom and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and he advocates compassion (``the only idea that makes any sense'')—which he defines in increasingly general ways until concluding that ``the society we get is the society we deserve.'' But while Minahan criticizes US education- -students, faculty, the MLA—his book offers neither cogent analysis nor solutions but, ironically, is itself symptomatic of a problem. Hired to teach writing, the author presents opinions as truth, ideology as ideas, polemic as rhetoric, cultural diagnoses as ``personal essays,'' stereotypes as style. If he were one of his students, Minahan probably would find that his own writing—replete with generalizations, shifting voice (the implicative ``we'' and accusing ``you''), and lack of discipline—would earn him a recommendation to change his major.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-883285-01-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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