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

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.

Appreciation of Roman Catholic schools is much a part of current discussions about how to help beleaguered public education. How St. Luke's, a small, inner-city high school in New Jersey, achieved small victories is reported on here with insight by a young, upper-middle-class graduate of a distinguished college, who sought meaningful interim experience before entering Yale Law School. At first, Gerson shared little with his students except "otherness" (he of Jewish background; his Jersey City, street-wise students, black and Hispanic and mostly non-Catholic), but as Gerson taught his American history curriculum in conjunction with current events, allowing consideration of ideas about honor and the relationship between rules and fairness, he found tangible evidence of learning and growth among his media-seduced teenagers. Gerson's account of his and the students' compatibility and of his efforts to tame their dissing scatology and confirm their worth uses a blend of humor and accountability. In addition, his report demonstrates that a small budget, high standards and committed teachers, along with supportive parents, are part of "an ethic of sacrifice" that makes St. Luke's a genuine community that only happens to be a Catholic school. Gerson is the author of Neoconservative Visions.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The first-person account of a neophyte history teacher in an inner-city high school: White, Republican, Ivy League, he epitomizes The Man to his mostly black and Hispanic students. What 23-year-old Gerson had going for him in September 1994 was his youth, his straightforward attitude, his skill at and knowledge of basketball, and a sense of humor. For instance, when his students pulled detention for classroom infractions, he kept them after school to listen to Frank Sinatra recordings in an unsuccessful effort to wean them from rap. The kids came to call it getting a Frank. As a teacher, Gerson labored to engage the students by embedding facts in dramatic stories of historical figures--a favorite with the students was the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. In current events, the O.J. Simpson trial was used as a springboard for discussions about constitutional rights. The school was a Roman Catholic institution in the heart of Jersey City, an enclave of civility, although it had its share of teenage pregnancies and family crises. The children came from neighborhoods rife with drug dealers and street shootings, and many had friends and relatives in prison. But their parents backed the school and the teachers and demanded hard work from their children, having made considerable sacrifices to pay tuition--conditions that are a barometer for school success, according to the latest studies. Nonetheless, what Gerson learned is that there are still two Americas, one rich and one poor, living side by side in suburb and city, respectively, yet each with its own social system and goals. Reconciling the two, Gerson suggests, takes more than tweaking educational practices. Among his suggestions: Personal contact between social classes, perhaps through a national service plan. Engaging anecdotes of a school year, leading to a thoughtful exploration of what urban and suburban cultures can learn from each other. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.