Paul Tough Tackles How Children Succeed
For the better part of the last decade New York Times reporter Paul Tough has written about education, poverty and the obstacles to success students both in New York and across America face.
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Divided We Fail: The Story of an African American Community That Ended the Era of School Desegregation
Sarah Garland’s “Divided We Fail” tells the story of how the African-American community in Louisville, Kentucky challenged and defeated the system of desegregation in pubic schools.
Read MoreThe New Kids: Faces of Young Immigrant Teens
In Brooke Hauser’s The New Kids, immigrant teenagers work to graduate high school at International High School in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, while struggling to live an ordinary life lacking basic …
Read MoreA generation later, ‘There Are No Children Here’ resonates
Reporter Alex Kotlowitz spent about two years in one of Chicago’s worst public housing complexes, the Henry Horner Houses, the kind of place where a teenager had almost the same …
Read MoreWhy Can’t You Teach Me 2 Read: The story of illiteracy in New York’s schools
Even the savviest subway traveler can be overwhelmed by New York City’s maze of underground trains and confusing signs. Imagine what it must be like for someone who can neither …
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Beyond Clichés: Ron Suskind’s “A Hope in The Unseen”
Ron Suskind challenged the American Dream when he began reporting A Hope in the Unseen, published in 1995. The maxim that working hard guaranteed success looked very different for the “other America.”
Read MoreRavitch Takes Aim at the Marketplace Reformers
Diane Ravitch takes critical aim at American education reform in The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010), evaluating the effectiveness of standardized testing, choice, and charter …
Read MoreRandom Family: The Absence of Love
In one scene in Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family, Jessica decides to get a tattoo on her chest that reads, “Jessica Loves George.” George—known to those in his Bronx community as …
Read MoreClass Warfare Takes an About Turn
Steven Brill’s book “Class Warfare looks at education reform over the last decade, focusing largely on school administrators, activists, and charter schools that take a “break some china” approach to …
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One Size Does Not Fit All: An Interview with 17-Year-Old Author Nikhil Goyal
Nikhil Goyal is the 17-year-old author of 2012’s One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School, a book that takes an exhaustive look at the U.S. school system and gives suggestions on how to transform it.
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