Product Details

Publishers Weekly

Keeping the challenges of urban education in mind, McCloskey, who writes for the New York Times, monitors a year of studies at a Catholic high school in Harlem in his debut book, revealing the soaring cost of academically training young poor and non-Catholic black males for graduation and college. The subject of the yearlong investigation is Rice High School, with principal Orlando Gober, who keeps the street culture at bay while pursuing educational excellence and a high moral foundation. With the highest black student population in the regional diocese, Gober makes no excuses for how schools have failed: "parents and teachers made excuses, which crippled their willpower.... People have to be held responsible for what they do." It is illuminating to see the struggles and triumphs of a school day where students feud, teachers jockey for power, and administrative control must be maintained at all costs. Powerful, eloquent, candid, McCloskey's account should be required reading for those who seek to remedy the academic woes of our troubled urban schools. (Jan.)

Kirkus Reviews

McCloskey embarks on a qualitative exploration of a New York City parochial high school. "The most urgent problem in American education today," the author writes, "is the high dropout rate and low achievement of inner-city minority students." As the Catholic school model has shown a measure of success in educational achievement and graduation rates, often with fewer resources than public institutions, McCloskey undertook a nonideological inquiry to see what makes one inner-city, underfunded Catholic school successful. This entailed a yearlong immersion into Rice High School, an all-boys parochial academy in Harlem with a student body comprised of 85 percent African-Americans and 15 percent Hispanics. The author sat in on daily classes, attended events and teachers' meetings, conducted interviews and visited students on their home turf. Rice is no cakewalk for students or teachers: All kids, regardless of issues, are taught in the same way, with a demanding curriculum, and there are expectations, discipline and extensive parent-teacher interaction. No effort is made to convert students to Catholicism, but morality and social justice are tangible dimensions of daily life. McCloskey situates Rice within the evolution of U.S. public and parochial education, noting its imperfections, but also the fact that it graduates many more students than public schools with similarly difficult demographics. The author makes a solid case for public funding of inner-city parochial schools that is both hard to challenge-certainly as long as the pedagogical and administrative model meets resistance in the public-education sphere-and likely to cause church-state feuds. Still, he notes, "[t]he only certaintyhere is that people who fight against public funding for inner-city Catholics schools would never condemn their children to the public schools they so readily consign those children."The unadorned narrative is convincing in its portrayal of Rice's mission to put an education, not a creed, into young men's heads.