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The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known--and cautiously avoided--by most of Baltimore But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate crossroad. Through the eyes of one broken family--two drug-addicted adults and their smart, vulnerable 15-year-old son, DeAndre McCollough, Simon and Burns examine the sinister realities of inner cities across the country and unflinchingly assess why law enforcement policies, moral crusades, and the welfare system have accomplished so little. This extraordinary book is a crucial look at the price of the drug culture and the poignant scenes of hope, caring, and love that astonishingly rise in the midst of a place America has abandoned..
Price: $8.61
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Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism
The most exciting innovation in education policy in the last decade is the emergence of highly effective schools in our nations inner cities, schools where disadvantaged teens make enormous gains in academic achievement. In this book, David Whitman takes readers inside six of these secondary schools and reveals the secret to their success: they are paternalistic. The schools teach teens how to act according to traditional, middle-class values, set and enforce exacting academic standards, and closely supervise student behavior. But unlike paternalistic institutions of the past, these schools are warm, caring places, where teachers and principals form paternal-like bonds with students. Though little explored to date, the new paternalistic schools are the most promising means yet for closing the nations costly and shameful achievement gap.Visit www.edexcellence.net for more information..
Price: $16.95
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The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect with Their Fathers
The Three Doctors-Drs. Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt-discovered early in their friendship that they shared one disturbing trait: As children, they had to navigate life in inner-city Newark without a father's support and guidance. While each young man dealt with the turmoil caused by an absent father, with no male role model to turn to for advice, each veered dangerously close to a life of delinquency, drugs, and crime. But despite great odds, the three overcame the statistics. In high school, they formed the Pact, a promise to one another that they would become doctors, and it kept them dedicated to one another and to their dream, and helped to put them on the road to successful careers as physicians. In The Bond, the Three Doctors plumb their own tough childhoods to explore the national epidemic of fatherlessness. But rather than cling to any bitterness or pain they may have felt as children about their fathers' inability to be in their lives, as adults Davis, Jenkins, and Hunt sought out their fathers and worked to reconnect with them. In the doctors' own words-and their fathers'-they describe the crucial lessons they learned, identifing ways to stem the tide of fatherlessness that's sweeping through communities across the country. Honest, brave, and poignant, The Bond is a book for every family, every father, and every man..
Price: $8.44
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Stand for the Best: What I Learned after Leaving My Job as CEO of H&R Block to Become a Teacher and Founder of an Inner-City Charter School
Thirteen years ago, Tom Bloch was CEO of H&R Block, the groundbreaking tax organization The son of the company’s founder, he was a happily married 41-year-old executive, but something was missing from his life. After a nineteen-year career at the company, Bloch resigned his position to become a math teacher in an impoverished inner-city section of Kansas City. Stand for the Best reveals Bloch’s struggles to make a difference for his marginalized students and how he eventually co-founded a successful charter school, University Academy..
Price: $12.45
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And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner-City Students
Bestselling author of The Killing Season and veteran Los Angeles Times reporter Miles Corwin spent a school year with twelve high school seniors -- South-Central kids who qualified for a gifted program because of theur exceptional IQs and test scores. Sitting alongside them in classrooms where bullets were known to rip through windows, Corwin chronicled their amazing odyssey as they faced the greatest challenges of their academic lives. And Still We Rise is an unforgettable story of transcending obstacles that would dash the hopes of any but the most exceptional spirits. .
Price: $1.99
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There Are No Shortcuts: How an inner-city teacher--winner of the American Teacher Award--inspires his students and challenges us to rethink the way we educate our children
The banner in Rafe Esquith’s classroom at Hobart Elementary School reads: “There are no shortcuts ” And his students are a testament to the power of that philosophy These are kids who speak English as a second language, fourth--and fifth--graders who go to school in a part of Los Angeles where violence and despair are the norms of the neighborhood. But the statistics are not what you’d expect: Esquith’s students score in the country’s top 10 percent on standardized tests and go on to colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, University of Chicago, Swarthmore, Stanford, and UCLA. How do they do it? Esquith’s view—that learning isn’t easy and that it shouldn’t be—is an increasingly unusual take among educators. Success, he believes, comes from a strong work ethic and from dedication and perseverance on the part of children, teachers, and parents alike. But such ideas prove to be a hard sell to those who believe that hard work and fun must be mutually exclusive. On the other hand, visitors from all over the world have made a pilgrimage to this astonishing classroom. Esquith’s students work hard. They are in the classroom at 6:30 a.m. and stay until 5:00 p.m. They come to school during their vacations. Each year the Hobart Shakespeareans, as Esquith’s students are known, perform one of the Bard’s plays—Sir Ian McKellen and Hal Holbrook are passionate patrons. These Renaissance children are outstanding mathematicians and scientists; they read Steinbeck and Malcolm X; they are artists; they play classical music and blistering rock 'n' roll. Above all, they are recognized for their impeccable manners, which serve them well as Esquith accompanies them all over the United States. They are, as many observers have commented, the gold standard in American education. His former students in middle and high school return on Saturdays, where they read Ibsen, Chekhov, and eight Shakespeare plays a year. In their “Wake Up with Will” program, these eager youngsters travel the world with Esquith and his wife, from London to Paris to colleges all over the country. It’s a classroom where the American Dream really does come true. There have been no shortcuts for Rafe Esquith, either. He had to learn the hard way: dealing with bureaucratic administrators, antagonistic colleagues, and his own impetuous and occasionally tactless, even confrontational, nature. But his history, peppered with funny and painful incidents, and a gallery of incisive portraits--Miss Mothball, Miss Busy-As-a-Bee, Mr. Incompetent--explains his extraordinary success as a teacher. His scathing yet loving view from the front lines is the most trenchant look at American education to appear in many years. It’s a full-alert warning signal, an inspiration, and a guide for teachers, parents, and all the rest of us who care about our country’s children..
Price: $7.89
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A Patch of Eden: America's Inner-City Gardeners
This is the delightful story of the resurgence in urban community gardening, describing the rehabilitation of jail inmates through raising organic vegetables, teaching inner city youngsters where food comes from, and laying out an inspirational plan to help all of us world-worn urbanites get involved once again in raising delicious food in the midst of our paved-over, formerly bleak, urban landscapes. This is about making the World a Better Place, about getting our fingers in the dirt, touching our planet with loving hands, and creating a vision of hope for our cities and our children. .
Price: $5.95
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Smart and Sassy: The Strengths of Inner-City Black Girls
Based on research findings, Smart and Sassy: The Strengths of Inner City Black Girls utilizes a foundation of theology, philosophy, sociology, human development, and contextual psychodynamic theory to understand how Black girls create meaningful identities. These substantive knowledge areas are interwoven with strength and health perspectives to theorize and interpret adolescent lives. Presented in their own language, the Black girls' factual self-narratives, group interactions, dialogs, and case illustrations reveal visceral and poignant stories that clearly indicate they are courageous, intelligent, and spirited. Smart and Sassy offers a developmental- and contextual-based model of intervention that can be used as a supportive counseling guide for adolescent maturation. Stevens asserts that an examination of such girls and their families provides information about competence and social assets that promote healthy development and positive social adjustment. Although it offers a particular ethnic focus, this text provides authoritative insight into the developmental issues confronting all adolescents. Its framework promotes critical thinking skills in both undergraduate and graduate students, and each case illustration features study questions and issues for discussion..
Price: $11.95
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On the Outside Looking In: A Year in an Inner-City High School
Cristina Rathbone's critically acclaimed On the Outside Looking In is the story, of inner-city kids who come from poverty, dysfunctional homes, and drug-riddled neighborhoods; of an underfunded high school and its devoted principal, who represent their last slim connections to mainstream society; and of a young reporter who, as Samuel Freedman wrote, "offered her young subjects both compassion and unflinching honesty ... even as she bore witness to the social chaos around them and the persistent humanity in them all"..
Price: $4.00
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Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education
The problems commonly associated with inner-city schools were not nearly as pervasive a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. In Schools Betrayed, her innovative history of race and urban education, Kathryn M. Neckerman tells the story of how and why these schools came to serve black children so much worse than their white counterparts.
Focusing on Chicago public schools between 1900 and 1960, Neckerman compares the circumstances of blacks and white immigrants, groups that had similarly little wealth and status yet came to gain vastly different benefits from their education. Their divergent educational outcomes, she contends, stemmed from Chicago officials’ decision to deal with rising African American migration by segregating schools and denying black students equal resources. And it deepened, she shows, because of techniques for managing academic failure that only reinforced inequality. Ultimately, these tactics eroded the legitimacy of the schools in Chicago’s black community, leaving educators unable to help their most disadvantaged students.
Schools Betrayed will be required reading for anyone who cares about urban education. (20070306).
Price: $23.15
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