Saving The School

Our friend, Michael Brick, has a new book out today. It's a great, important read.

Dana Goldstein:

Brick has done his homework on the history of American education, and he accurately assesses why schools like Reagan often appear to be such blighted places: less because their teachers are uniformly uncaring or their students unmotivated than because so many impoverished schools have become, over the past 30 years, increasingly cut off from the mainstream of American society, situated in neighborhoods victimized by white and middle-class flight; asked to compete with charter schools; and then left to educate a greater proportion of poor, special education, and non-English speaking students than the public school system at large. Reagan High is a good stand-in for the approximately 1,700 high schools across the country that are classified by the Obama administration as "persistently failing." They are also sometimes known as "drop-out factories:" schools where more than half of the freshman class never graduates.

Go find a copy. And tell Brick you love him.