BOOK REVIEW:
This is a book for teachers, by a teacher—a next-generation Jaime Escalante, who achieves tremendous results in his inner-city Los Angeles classroom. Esquith and his 5th-grade charges are best known for staging award-winning Shakespearean plays, done with pitch perfection and a full rock ‘n‘ roll band. But what happens during the school day is just as inspirational and already more influential, for his “be nice and work hard” classroom culture has already been replicated in 50 Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools nationwide. In the right hands, this book will help that culture spread further still, complete as it is with straight talk and concrete suggestions. He explains how teachers can “replace fear with trust.” He describes his classroom economic system, complete with jobs, paychecks, fines, and rewards. He offers actionable advice about teaching math, literature, history, and the rest of the traditional liberal arts curriculum. Still, this is not just a book full of happy talk and innovative ideas; Esquith shoots arrows at administrators “out of Orwell' Truth” who force “literacy coaches” and joyless scripted reading on him and his colleagues. Which raises an uncomfortable question: How can we keep from driving the Rafe Esquiths of the world crazy (and out of the classroom) through our clumsy attempts to remediate and compensate for their less-inspired peers?
In this volume, the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey has penned an energetic attack on all things federal in K–12 schooling. He sets out to “lay bare the history of American education” and “the incursion of ever-bigger government into our nation’s classrooms” and then offers something of a greatest hits compendium: going after the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, busing, the creation of the Department of Education, America 2000, and No Child Left Behind. He points out that the U.S. Constitution envisions no federal role in education, decries judicial activism in schooling, and closes by recommending more local control and school choice. He calls for dismantling the Department of Education, shifting the department’s Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice, eliminating various federal education programs, and either zeroing out federal education-related expenditures or converting them to block grants. The volume provides a pedestrian but useful summary of the case against federal hubris—one that is timely as we debate the reauthorization of NCLB. While the tone is a bit strident and the sourcing disappointingly reliant on the readily Internet-accessible, McCluskey reminds readers why well-intentioned calls for federal leadership and shiny plans for national programs can ultimately prove treacherous.
Journalist Susan Eaton’s latest book on education tells two related stories—and tells them quite well. She first traces the still-running saga of Connecticut’s landmark school desegregation case, Sheff v. O’Neill, as it was decided, reversed on appeal, reopened, settled, and reopened yet again over an 18-year period. But the centerpiece of the book is Eaton’s account of four years spent in the classroom of Lois Luddy, a teacher at an outwardly successful all-minority Hartford elementary school. The indefatigable Ms. Luddy manages to prepare her 3rd and 4th graders well for state tests while ensuring that they remain curious and motivated learners. Yet, by emphasizing the narrowness of the students’ life experiences, the narrative is intended to reveal the ultimate limits of reform strategies that stop short of full-scale integration along lines of race, ethnicity, and economic status. Readers may well question Eaton’s vilification of the state’s lawyers and expert witnesses in Sheff, her pat dismissals of current reform efforts, and her optimistic interpretation of research on the long-term consequences of integration, but it is hard not to be awed by the depth of the education challenges she so vividly describes. |
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