Two recent books from the mainstream press put a human face on the urban youth whose life challenges and obstacles to academic success are more typically documented in scholarly research. Christina Rathbone’s On the Outside Looking In: A Year in an Inner-City High School (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), and Ron Suskind’s A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (Broadway Books, 1998), provide full, rich portraits of students struggling to find their way in two of America’s most visible urban school districts.

A HOPE IN THE UNSEEN:
Suskind, a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer for the Wall Street Journal, follows Cedric Jennings from Ballou Senior High School in Washington, D.C., to the ivy halls of Brown University. It’s a rough journey, with many surprising turns. Jennings — an academic all-star in a school where smart, ambitious Black kids are taunted and bullied by their peers — maintains pinpoint focus on his goals. His mother and his church offer bedrock support. But his urban education is full of yawning holes, and his father is either absent or in prison during most of his childhood.

Suskind sticks tight by Cedric’s side for nearly three years — from church services to poignant moments with his mother to disagreements with his privileged White roommate at Brown. This book goes far beyond the tale of a ghetto youth overcoming the odds; it paints a complex story of a boy growing into manhood. Along the way, Suskind explores such thorny issues as affirmative action, race relations, and educational opportunity gaps that SAT scores can’t begin to measure. Dreaming about the Ivy League schools located so far from his neighborhood, Cedric tells the high school teacher who mentors him, "I know it’s crazy, but I believe that’s where I belong, even if they’re places I haven’t really seen." As Suskind relates in this remarkable story, Cedric is a boy who needs "something to push against" to become the man he wants to be.

ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN:
After a decade in New York, writer Christina Rathbone had lived in all corners of the city, traveling from "the wealthiest enclaves to some of its poorest neighborhoods." She had written about helicopter pilots, perfume creators, and tugboat captains, but "never so much as spoken to an inner-city teenager." If she saw teens clustered on street corners, she would automatically cross the street. Not until she stepped onto their turf — the urban high school — did she stop thinking about city kids only in negative stereotypes.

Through Rathbone’s eyes, readers get acquainted with the students and staff of West Side High School, a "last-chance high" for youth who have fallen out of the educational mainstream. School is only one place where they’ve known trouble. Many have been abused, neglected, or kicked out by parents; arrested for drugs or violence; recruited by gangs or drug dealers. But these gritty details tell only part of their story. As Rathbone gradually realizes, "Simply knowing the truth was just the beginning, not the answer at all. Doing anything to change the truth was — well, an entirely more complex affair." Throughout the book, Rathbone shadows Ed Reynolds, the West Side principal who tries to salvage his students’ lives. Some will fall through the safety net Reynolds and his teachers cast. But many make it through, inspiring Rathbone — and readers — with their courage and grit.

CITY KIDS, CITY TEACHERS:
Reports from the Front Row (The New Press, 1996) records the voices of students, teachers, and scholars engaged in shaping urban classrooms across the country. Editors William Ayers and Patricia Ford, both with the University of Illinois at Chicago, share their own powerful bias: "... knowing city kids as learners, discovering them as three-dimensional beings, as fellow creatures, is an important place for teachers to begin."

Teaching the diverse learners who attend urban schools requires "multiple entry points to learning," the editors argue, "an assortment of pathways to success." And success is not an unreachable goal, as this collection of thoughtful, passionate essays reveals. The editors point the way to "an urban pedagogy … built on the strengths of the city, the hope and the promise of city kids and families, on the capacities of city teachers."

"NOTHING YOU HAVE DONE,
no class you’ve taken, no course load you’ve endured, no job you’ve worked is as hard as teaching these children. You ask yourself, Why am I doing this and when can I quit?"

So begins Who Will Teach for America?, Michael Shapiro’s account of the successes and failures of the Teach for America program, a national effort to recruit some of the nation’s most elite college graduates to help solve the teaching shortages in inner-city and rural classrooms.

Although the book was published in 1993 after the first year of the program, the stories it tells still ring true for new teachers and those who haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be a rookie in the classroom. The book profiles seven newly recruited teachers who struggle with their own lack of formal teacher preparation and their students’ negative attitudes toward education. A recent M.I.T. graduate who has loved science all her life lies awake at night, trying to find a way to make her junior high students "think that learning about the classification of species was, if not essential to their lives, nonetheless interesting." A young woman with a degree from Georgetown returns to the New York slums where she grew up, hoping to make a difference in the lives of kindergartners. In the neighborhood with the highest murder rate in the city, she hears from her students "how Mom my’s boyfriend beat up Mom my, or how Daddy is in jail or that Daddy is dead because somebody shot him." She longs to protect them, but she also wants "to cover her ears and hurry away." An idealistic young graduate of the University of Minnesota learns the hard way about the need to maintain order in the classroom.

Along with finely crafted teacher portraits and glimpses into urban classrooms, Shapiro mixes in opinions from educational experts and reformers such as James Comer of the Yale University Child Study Center and Linda Darling-Hammond, formerly of Columbia University’s Teachers College. In the end, he offers more questions than answers about how to solve the teacher shortage in urban schools. But the questions make for thought-provoking reading. The young people who volunteer for Teach for America, he points out, wind up asking themselves hard questions, too: "Was their impact as fleeting as a footprint in the sand? Or did something they say, or something they did, light a spark that might make a child see school as they had seen it?"

For more information about Teach for America, see the Web site: www.teachforamerica.org, or call 1-800-832-1230, ext. 225.

— Suzie Boss

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