Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America

by Mike Rose

Overview

"This big-shouldered book, full of ardor...offers us a reasonable hope that with attention and care we can again make public education what it was meant to be, and must yet be."—The Los Angeles Times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140236170
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/01/1996
Edition description:	544th ed.
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.43(h) x 1.06(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mike Rose is a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He has taught in a wide range of educational settings, from elementary school to adult literacy and job training programs. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Grawemeyer Award in Education, and awards from the Spencer Foundation, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Modern Language Association, and the American Educational Research Association. He also received the Commonwealth Club of California’s Award for Literary Excellence in Nonfiction. His books include Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, and Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.

Table of Contents

Possible LivesIntroduction
1. Los Angeles and the LA Basin
2. Calexico, California
3. Baltimore, Maryland
4. Chicago, Illinois
5. New York, New York
6. Berea and Wheelwright, Kentucky
7. Hattiesburg, Tupelo, Jackson, Indianola, Hollandale, and Webb, Mississippi
8. Polaris and Missoula, Montana
9. Tucson, Arizona
10. Possible Lives
A Note on Method
Notes
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

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. (Sept.)

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