While high school drop-out rates have steadily declined among white and African American students over the 1970s and 1980s a constant 35 percent of Latino students continued to quit school before graduation. In this pioneering work, Harriett Romo and Toni Falbo reveal how a group of at-risk Latino students defied the odds and earned a high school diploma.
Romo and Falbo tracked the progress of 100 students in Austin, Texas, from 1989 to 1993. Drawing on interviews with the students and their parents, school records, and fieldwork in the schools and communities, the authors identify both the obstacles that caused many students to drop out and the successful strategies that other students and their parents pursued to ensure high school graduation.
The authors conclude with seven far-reaching recommendations for changes in the public schools. Sure to provoke debate among all school constituencies, this book will be required reading for school administrators, teachers, parents, legislators, and community leaders.
Around 10,000 tax dollars will put a child through many public schools for a year. About 10,000 private dollars will put him through prep school. Why, then, is one system troubled and the other thriving, one vilified and the other celebrated? In this book, a renowned historian of education searches out the lessons that private schooling might offer public education as cries for school reform grow louder.
Lessons from Privilege explores a tradition shaped by experience and common sense, and guided by principles that encourage community, personal relationships, and high academic standards. These "basic" values make a profound difference in a time when popular culture, which mocks intellectual curiosity and celebrates mental passivity, competes so successfully for students' attention.
Arthur Powell uses the experience of private education to put the whole schooling enterprise in fresh perspective. He shows how the sense of schools as special communities can help instill passion and commitment in teachers, administrators, and students alike--and how passion and commitment are absolutely necessary for educational success. The power of economic resources, invested fully in schools, also becomes pointedly clear here, as does the value of incentives for teachers and students.
Though the concerns this book brings into focus--for decent character and academic literacy--may never be trendy or easily applied, Lessons from Privilege presents sensible, powerful, and profitable ideas for enhancing the humanity and dignity of education in America.
Transiciones is a thorough ethnography of seven Latino students in transition between high school and community college or university. Data gathered over two years of interviews with the students, their high school English teachers, and their writing teachers and administrators at postsecondary institutions reveal a rich picture of the conflicted experience of these students as they attempted to balance the demands of schooling with a variety of personal responsibilities.
Todd Ruecker explores the disconnect between students’ writing experiences in high school and higher education and examines the integral role that writing plays in college. Considering the almost universal requirement that students take a writing class in their critical first year of college, he contends that it is essential for composition researchers and teachers to gain a fuller understanding of the role they play in supporting and hindering Latina and Latino students’ transition to college.
Arguing for situating writing programs in larger discussions of high school/college alignment, student engagement, and retention, Transiciones raises the profile of what writing programs can do while calling composition teachers, administrators, and scholars to engage in more collaboration across the institution, across institutions, and across disciplines to make the transition from high school to college writing more successful for this important group of students.
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