Educational Leadership recently asked seven leaders to share the book that most inspired, expanded, and provoked their thinking about education in the past year. Their top picks create a varied—and interesting—summer reading list.
Gloria J. Ladson-Billings
The Long Haul—An Autobiography. Myles Horton. New York: Teachers College Press, 1998.
Every once in a while, rereading a good book affords new insights and develops new visions. My selection for summer reading is The Long Haul: An Autobiography by Myles Horton.
Myles Horton was born in Savannah, Tennessee, in 1905. His deep commitment to social justice, equality, and the dignity of all people compelled him to devote his life to education as a force for liberation. One of the most visible manifestations of Horton's work is the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. He founded Highlander to ensure that the poor, working class, and people of color could come together to work on solutions to their own problems. Highlander became the site of support, training, and encouragement for some of the modern civil rights era's most significant actors, including Septima Clark, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Although focusing on adult education and community organization, Horton's work offers teachers and teacher educators critical insights into teaching and learning. The Long Haul includes some simple yet profound ideas that might change the way we think about teaching. Instead of providing prescriptive routines, Horton lays a solid philosophical foundation to help us understand broader issues that confront all educators. For example, Horton asserts, "I learned to listen and turn people's ideas around in my mind. They were experts on their own lives and their own experiences. And those experiences could have something to teach me even if I didn't see it at the moment." Consider how different our schools might be if teachers applied this principle to every classroom!
Another statement from Horton's autobiography challenged me to think deeply and carefully about my teaching: "You don't have to know the answers. The answers come from the people, and when they don't have any answers, then you have another role, and you find resources." Now I think of ways to help students find their own answers rather than setting myself up as the font of all knowledge. The Long Haul reinforces the idea that education can be one of the greatest forces for social change. In the end, the work of teaching is not merely about skills and drills. Rather, education, teaching, and learning are the necessary tools for the long haul of perfecting a democracy.
Published by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027. Price: $17.95.
—Gloria J. Ladson-Billings is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ted Sizer
The Other Side of the River. Alex Kotlowitz. New York: Doubleday, 1998.
Educators know Alex Kotlowitz's first book, There Are No Children Here, a detailed account of Alex's friendship with two African-American middle schoolers and their mother who lived in a public housing project in Chicago. Kotlowitz, a white reporter for the Wall Street Journal, listened, watched, questioned, and pondered carefully, and the result was a delicate, stunning, and deeply troubling account of what it means to grow up black and poor in an American city in these years of unprecedented American prosperity.
With this new book, Kotlowitz continues his inquiry into the nature of American race and class with an equally nuanced and probing study of two adjacent small cities, Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, Michigan. The latter is a prosperous "modest town of 9,000 that resembles the quaint tourist haunts of the New England coast." Its population is 95 percent white. The former is "92 percent black and dirt poor." A river separates the towns—physically and spiritually. The discovery of a black teenager's body in the river is the focus of Kotlowitz' four-year study of the people in these ironically-labeled "twin cities."
This book rebukes America's conscience. Its careful portraits of decent, conflicted, and frightened citizens expose the stereotyping that so characterizes American social and educational policy, where people are gathered into cloddish groupings and reduced to numbers, and where the soul of our people is plumbed by quickie telephone polls. Kotlowitz reminds us of how little we really know about one another. We settle for what we learn from television sitcoms and sound bites, and forget the importance of finding again the inherent humanity of every one of us, of whatever race and class. If we do not know each other, how can we become a decent nation? Such is not mere sentimentalism. It is an imperative that screams for attention.
Published by Doubleday, 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036. Price: $24.95.
—Ted Sizer is Chairman of the Coalition for Essential Schools.
Stan Karp
Beyond Heroes and Holidays—A Practical Guide to K–12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development. Enid Lee, Deborah Menkart, Margo Okazawa-Rey, editors. Washington, DC: Network of Educators on the Americas, 1998.
Recently I watched an episode of "Star Trek Voyager" in which the crew was subjected to the evil experiments of invisible aliens. Needles were attached to the heads of unsuspecting crew members, causing some to suffer agonizing pain, others to waste away, and still others to engage in uncharacteristically stupid behavior. The story reminded me of the urban high school I've taught in for 20 years. But instead of being tortured by alien experiments, the inhabitants seem afflicted by the debilitating legacy of racism, often no less invisible and with similarly unhappy results.
Beyond Heroes and Holidays renewed my hope that schools may yet find ways to address this dilemma. Beyond Heroes is a toolkit for unpacking years of personal, institutional, and historical baggage and raising hard issues in constructive ways. It shows how the trendy but soft and superficial multiculturalism now prevalent in schools might become more robust and powerful. It moves beyond "celebrating diversity" to understanding why some differences translate into access to privilege and power, while others are a source of discrimination and injustice. With its many practical strategies for creating dialogue and real change in school communities, Beyond Heroes and Holidays left me hopeful that we might yet move to a higher ground of mutual understanding and join in a common struggle for justice in schools and out.
Published by Network of Educators on the Americas. Order from NECA, P.O. Box 73038, Washington, D.C. 20056-3038 (Fax 202-238-2378; e-mail: necadc@aol.com). Price: $20.
—Stan Karp teaches English and journalism in Paterson, New Jersey. He is co-editor of the newsletter Rethinking Schools.
Diane Ravitch
Craftsmanship in Teaching. William Chandler Bagley. New York: Macmillan, 1911.
This past year I read a book that I happily recommend to anyone who wants to gain insight into long-standing issues in American education: William Chandler Bagley's Craftsmanship in Teaching. Writing in a conversational style, Bagley offers wise counsel about many problems that teachers and supervisors face. The reader will be amused to discover many current issues in a book written in 1911; some are dated (such as Bagley's view that teaching requires a vow of poverty!), but most are not. Bagley was an important figure in American education in the first four decades of this century (I also recommend Bagley's Determinism in Education—against IQ testing—and Education and Emergent Man—his philosophy of education).
I recently wrote a chapter about him for a book titled Forgotten Heroes of the American Past, which will be published this year by Free Press. He was the most outspoken critic of intelligence testing in the 1920s. Over the years he spoke out for high standards, a common curriculum, federal aid, and well-educated teachers. The only cause that he advocated, year in and year out, was that every classroom should have a well-educated, cultured teacher. Reading this book reminds us of how far we still are from achieving that obvious and critical goal.
Published by Macmillan. Check a library for this book.
—Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University.
Deborah Meier
Political Leadership and Educational Failure. Seymour Sarason. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
Every so often I take time off to reread Seymour Sarason's many books on school reform. This year, I began with Political Leadership and Educational Failure. For 25 years, Sarason has been pounding out the same message in his lively, contentious, curmudgeonly way. I always want to argue with him, or object to some of his examples—his style invites it. But in the end he has it right as almost no one else does. We have yet to take seriously the overarching purpose of education (What are schools for?), and we assiduously avoid applying, or even acknowledging, our own history (Has this been tried and, if so, what happened?). We play dumb when it comes to tackling education issues.
How absurd! Sarason views the impact of schooling on generations of kids to be inimicable to serious intellectual discourse. He asserts on good evidence that schooling as we know it dampens human curiosity, wonder, and independent thought—the very heart of its traditional purpose. And when schools here and there do break the mold, we find hundreds of reasons that we can't learn from them.
So he is alarmed—enraged—at the continual charade. His well-reasoned indignation gets to me every time. I realize I can't just enjoy weeding in my own garden—running my contrary little schools. It's hard to rest easy after you take on a Sarason. He gives tough medicine, the kind that leaves a strong aftertaste. He challenges the mind.
Published by Jossey-Bass, 350 Samsone St., San Francisco, CA 94104. Price: $32.95.
—Deborah Meier is Principal of Mission Hill School in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Art Steller
Required Reading—Why Our American Classics Matter Now. Andrew Delbanco. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1997.
Until recently, I considered myself a good writer—and a good reader, reading more than 60 books per year. My bubble permanently burst when I strayed from my usual path of non-fictional, predominantly educational works, to great works of fiction. But I needed a road map—a reading list similar to those we give to schoolchildren. My search led me to the newly released and aptly titled Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now.
The writers selected for Delbanco's analysis include Herman Melville, Henry Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston. Delbanco selected these writers because they expanded the repertoire of American language and political possibilities. The authors addressed both the ideas of human existence and the aesthetic delight of language: First and last, they were inspired practitioners of the American language. Although they valued the literary achievements of the past, they were determined to enlarge the expressive range of the language beyond where their predecessors had left it. To read them is to experience anew the pleasure that everyone knows who has ever tried to coax a sentence out of the conventional form in which it wants to settle, and who manages to carry it instead toward a new shape, a new gesture, a new style. Recognizing this when it happens on the page is what reading is all about.
Required Reading's chapters offer a penetrating analysis of style and prosody, rather than a restatement of the author's philosophy or themes. Without Delbanco's guidance, I would likely have realized that on the belief in transcendentalism was common to these American writers, but my predilection to search for meaning would have caused me to overlook the joyful manipulation of words. That makes me half a reader.
I may have found one key to great literature: language itself. My ability to grasp the richness of the English language, however, is currently below par compared to my own expectations for college-bound high school students. Despite my lengthy experience in reading, I have left out great literature from my own reading list. My steps will be lively to catch up on a lifetime of reading.
Published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 19 Union Square W., New York, NY 10003-3381. Price: $24.
—Art Steller is Superintendent of the Kingston School District in Kingston, New York.
Paul Schwarz
Successful School Restructuring. Fred M. Newmann and Gary G. Wehlage. Madison, WI: Wisconsin Center for Educational Research, 1995.
From the local schoolhouse to national policy, we hear a common refrain about school improvement initiatives—"Does it improve student achievement and instructional practice?" Every request for proposal, every school improvement plan, and most research proposals ask this same question—"Are teaching and learning improving?" Hooray! This is a back-to-basics movement with which few can argue.
Ah, but the nature of the data that we collect to judge effectiveness—there's the rub. Policymakers need "simplified data" that can be used across broad constituencies, measured, and quantified. Many teachers and principals rail against such standardized data and look for data that reflect the complexity of individual students and the complicated, idiosyncratic institutions that they work in. They want "complex data."
Both needs are real. Having recently left the microworld of a school for the macroworld of the Department of Education, I have been struggling to find language and data that are accessible to, and usable by, both groups. That search led me, happily, back to an old favorite, Newmann and Wehlage's Successful School Restructuring.
This short book offers data complex and simple enough for both ends of the professional continuum, and does so in a thoughtful, readable way. By examining the complexity of schools and learning, and by presenting clear and high standards for its judgments, the book treats educators with respect and gives us a common language to wrestle with big and small issues.
Newmann and Wehlage provide a construct of schools, teaching, and learning on which to build our dreams for the future. The book is a great starting point for conversations between the wide continuum of folks who are committed to improving our schools for all children.
Published by the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools. Wisconsin Center for Education Research, 1025 W. Johnson St., Rm. 242, Madison, WI 53706. Price: $9.95.
—Paul Schwarz is on leave as Principal of Central Park East Secondary School in New York City.
