An extensive, well-organized work on the current state of public education.
Walsh (There’s a Giant in My Classroom and Other Poems from Around School, 2013, etc.) describes the current landscape of American public schools in this informative guide.
Public education is a remarkable feature of the American experience, one that can prove transformative in the lives of children. Unfortunately, a number of factors have led to a system that’s anything but uniform: a patchwork of thriving or failing school districts that offer very different qualities of education. Walsh’s book, structured as a Q-and-A and divided into sections by topic, strives to answer questions, obvious and otherwise, that parents of a potential public school student should ask themselves. The author covers the current state of the education-reform movement (including its history, motivations, and achievement gaps) and looks at how to spot the qualities of a good school, how to prepare and assist one’s child outside the classroom, and the nuances of teacher quality, Common Core, standardized tests, and the charter school movement. Walsh’s questions are highly specific, such as “What does a developmentally appropriate middle school program look like?” and quite comprehensive. One can read the book straight through, but the format encourages readers to skip around to find answers to the questions that most concern them. As a parent, teacher, literacy specialist, and public school advocate, Walsh is well-versed in the practicalities and politics of public schools. Although the book is a nuts-and-bolts manual meant to address the realities of the system as it currently stands, Walsh makes a point of editorializing on movements and solutions that he thinks would improve schooling for everyone. The first thing to keep in mind, he notes, is that education is not a solution to poverty. Rather, he says, poverty is the main impediment to education: “If we can make significant strides in improving the economic outlook of the 24% of American children living in poverty, improved educational opportunity will be the joyous and very predictable outcome.” Until then, parents tasked with navigating this inequality will have Walsh as their guide.
An extensive, well-organized work on the current state of public education.Pub Date: March 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942146-33-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Garn Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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