IN THE CLASSROOM: Dispatches from an Inner-City School that Works - Hardcover

Gerson, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684827565 ISBN 13: 9780684827568

Publisher: Free Press, 1997

Synopsis

Unlike any recent book on education and inner-city life, In the Classroom provides an intimate, unsparing, and hopeful portrait of a poor parochial high school that turns scant resources into success through discipline, faith, and the often untapped power of parents and teachers.
When Mark Gerson walked through the doors of a spartan Jersey City Catholic high school to begin a year of teaching, he entered a world that he, like most affluent young people, had never known. A young, Jewish, Frank Sinatra-loving, jacket-and-tie-wearing suburbanite, Gerson was placed in charge of mostly black and Hispanic inner-city students with a penchant for rap music, tough talk (and action), and oversized jeans. After he won their respect in the classroom and on the basketball court, the students opened up with Gerson, sharing with him a world of their conflicts and hopes and their stark opinions on race, crime, welfare, sex, and religion.
The views of this new generation of city kids and their families will often surprise: they fit no easy categories and show a powerful determination to succeed that goes beyond the limited choices and opportunities offered in our present schooling system.

About this title

Review

What happens when a Frank Sinatra-loving, Jewish college graduate from the suburbs takes a year before law school to teach at an inner-city Catholic high school? Mark Gerson has written a remarkable book based upon his experiences with the mostly black and Hispanic student population of St. Luke High School in Jersey City, New Jersey. In the Classroom demolishes the myth that poor, minority students are unteachable, although Gerson recounts in page-turning prose the many challenges he faced giving them an education. As Gerson shows, success simply requires discipline, parental involvement, and a genuine interest in students' lives.

Review

In part the story of a young middle-class Jew's encounter with a group of poor kids from Jersey City's mean streets, In the Classroom is also an insider's look at one of the most important education stories of our day: how Catholic schools have managed to succeed with the same populations and in the very same districts where public schools fail miserably, and to do so at one-third to one-half of what public schools cost the taxpayers.

Through intimate portraits of some of his students and fascinating reports of their classroom dialogue, Gerson shows how the moral climate of St. Luke's, a Catholic parochial school in Jersey City, worked to combat the various pathologies that affected them in their demoralized and culturally isolated neighborhoods.

St. Luke's was hardly able to offer its overworked teachers a living wage; it often lacked books; and its physical plant was crumbling. But by establishing a foundation of order, and by meeting the student's own standards of justice, it was able to create conditions for teaching and learning. Students in Gerson's classes worked hard, wrote extensively, and achieved self-esteem by mastering the rudiments of their country's history. There was nothing miraculous in this. All it involved was common sense and an age-old understanding of human nature.

During the past two decades, dozens of books have touted a grab bag of "prevention programs" that can supposedly inoculate "at-risk" ghetto youths against the dangers of teen pregnancy, delinquency, and calamitous dropout rates. Many, if not all, of these programs have turned out to be duds, their claims of success revealed as utterly spurious. Yet that has not stopped the clamor for ever higher levels of public funding.

In this relatively brief memoir, Mark Gerson points to another and better way. Although Gerson himself has since moved on to law school, his example--and that of St. Luke's--should be emulated, and replicated, by the score. -- Commentary, Sol Stern

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0684827565
• ISBN 13: 9780684827568
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288