If you were deserted on a desert island with your urban school, and you could only have one book, I would strongly recommend City Kids City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row.
I returned to this book today for something for student teachers to offset what they will see next week when PAARC starts. Below is a review I wrote in 2010–my recommendation holds as true today as a few years ago. Interesting to see how a book can stand up to the many changes we have experienced–for good or ill.
City Kids, City Schools encompasses concern for our children and education, looking for authentic perspectives and real stories from people in the front row.
City Kids City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row. Edited by William Ayers, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Gregory Miche and Pedro Noguero.Foreword by Ruby Dee. Afterword by Jeff Chang
If you were deserted on a desert island with your urban school, and you could only have one book, I would strongly recommend City Kids City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row (Edited by William Ayers, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Gregory Miche and Pedro Noguero). Whether you are looking for practical ideas for the classrooms, research and statistics, essays from related fields of social justice, politics and history, or spoken word, poetry, memoir or fiction, you can find a beautifully written relevant thought-provoking selection. This book will stimulate discussion, deepen understanding and inspire further teaching and learning to reach every child in our schools. This is not light reading, nor is it disheartening or tedious. There is a vitality and energy in each selection that leaves me with more understanding of what I can do and why I must continue in the effort—motivated rather than discouraged.
As a collection, it works as a resource where you can search by writer, topic or genre. It is also a powerful read with a cumulative impact if you start at the beginning and read sequentially, I find myself regularly going back and re-reading, finding pieces to share with colleagues, use in workshops and seminars and offer to students for examples and inspiration. My copy became so full of sticky notes that I had to start color-coding them.
This book is a treasure trove for anyone with interest and concern for our children and education, whether you read for your own learning and inspiration or you want resources to bring to students and adults. If you are looking for authentic perspectives, information, and real stories from people in the front row, engaged in the real struggle. You can move from Linda Christensen’s account of discovering a way in her classroom through a “Curriculum of Empathy,” to get her students involved in a novel by teaching them to “enter the lives of characters in literature, history, or real life whom they might dismiss or misunderstand…” to Marion Unas Esguerra’s poem “morning papers,” dealing with “issues of language, culture, prejudice, and assimilation that many immigrant children in urban areas—and their parents—must confront”, to Grace Boggs’ call to” root students and faculty in communities…and engage them in the kind of real problem solving in their localities that nurture a love of place and provides practice in creating the sustainable economies, equality and community that are the responsibilities of citizenship.” The list of well-known authors and heroes is long.
As (now late) Ruby Dee writes in the foreword, “ “City Kids, City Schools holds the banner high for a more rewarding quality of life reminding us of our responsibility as citizens to work for, to insist on, and to ensure a free, quality education to every child. It will not happen without our vigilance, our profoundest commitment—especially those of us whose voices, like mine, like those in this book—have been nourished by some of the great minds that steady and enlighten our lives. This book engages all our sensibilities toward the glorification of our remarkable species.”
If you were allowed a second book on your deserted island, consider an earlier and similar collection also edited by William Ayers (and others), titled City Kids City Teachers. In the foreword to that book, the late Ossie Davis wrote a summary that applies to both of these wonderful resources. “In this book, our cities’ students and teachers share their problems, their prospects, and their plans. It is vital that all of us look deep into these pages, to listen and to learn….Look to these pages for guidance and light.”