As public schools become increasingly embattled by budget shortfalls, crowded buildings, and ever-more-rigid curricula, the burden of these restrictions has drastically changed the way children are expected to learn. Nowhere is this more obvious or more devastating than classrooms in high-need urban areas. Drawing upon teachers' firsthand experiences in some of today's most demanding schools, leading education experts Beverly Falk and Megan Blumenreich...

Heather Kirn Lanier joined Teach For America (TFA), a program that thrusts eager but inexperienced college graduates into America's most impoverished areas to teach, asking them to do whatever is necessary to catch their disadvantaged kids up to the rest of the nation. With little more than a five-week teacher boot camp and the knowledge that David Simon referred to her future school as "The Terrordome," the altruistic and naive Lanier devoted herself...

From the Publisher: A follow-up to the classic collection on the realities of teaching and learning in urban schools. Of the approximately 50 million public school students in the United States, more than half are in urban schools. A contemporary companion to City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, this new and timely collection has been compiled by four of the country's most prominent urban educators. Contributors including Sandra...

"Coming of Age in the Other America illuminates the profound effects of neighborhoods on impoverished families. The authors conducted in-depth interviews and fieldwork with 150 young adults, and found that those who had been able to move to better neighborhoods--either as part of the Moving to Opportunity program or by other means--achieved much higher rates of high school completion and college enrollment than their parents. About half the youth...