Educating the Urban Race: The Evolution of an American High School

In a book which leads the reader briskly through layers of historical, social, institutional, and personal experience, Ericka Fisher frankly yet respectfully appraises urban education as reflected in Burncoat High School in Worcester, MA, revealing the ways in which equity and opportunity are undermined for some groups as compared to others while enhanced for all through the power of care, mutual understanding, and authentic relationship between adults and students. Her book is a thoughtful and thought-provoking study of urban schooling. (Thomas Del Prete, Clark University) Sometimes we have to look closely before we can understand how many factors undermine adolescents as they move closer to adulthood and why it’s so much more damaging for those who come without all the advantages that money and social status bring with them. Fisher has put together a moving account of why being “at risk” will require many difficult decisions. Building trustful relationships between schools and young people cannot happen without rethinking high schools from the bottom up. (Deborah Meier, New York University, founder of New York City's Central Park East public schools and Boston's Mission Hill school)