Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America - Hardcover

Rose, Mike

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395745462 ISBN 13: 9780395745465

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1995

Synopsis

We are told daily, it seems, that our students don't measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or their peers in other countries. But over the past four years, Mike Rose has been visiting classrooms across the country - from blue-collar Los Angeles to Mexican-American border towns; from the south side of Chicago to rural Montana; from Mississippi and Kentucky to Baltimore and New York City - and has been struck again and again by their intellectual and social richness and by what they suggest about the current state of education. Rose's previous book, Lives on the Boundary, was an award-winning investigation of the way America views its large numbers of adults and children who have been labeled remedial, underprepared, or illiterate. In Possible Lives Rose provides a provocative opportunity to revitalize our hopes for public education by taking us into classrooms. He watches teachers work and listens as students reason through problems. With compassion, insight, and

About this title

About the Author:

Mike Rose is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and UCLA Writing Programs.

From Publishers Weekly:

Rose (Lives on the Boundary) spent four years crisscrossing the U.S. to sit in on public school classrooms in New York, Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles, from the Mississippi Delta to Kentucky's coal district to the bicultural California city of Calexico on the Mexican border. In a hopeful journey through America's public school system, he emphasizes examples of inspired teaching, insight and connection, achievement against odds. The effective teachers whom he profiles through interviews, oral testimonies and reportage evinced solidarity with students' backgrounds, maintained high expectations and let students shape the direction of discussion; their classes demanded thought, participation, effort. Rose, who directs the UCLA writing program, sets these portraits of dynamic classrooms in the context of school-policy battles, community action and a legacy of systematic underfunding. Condemning the "strange mix of apocalyptic vignettes" that passes for public discussion about the state of American education, he offers a constructive and inspirational resource for anyone concerned about the health of public education.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0395745462
• ISBN 13: 9780395745465
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416