Ain’t Nobody Be Learnin’ Nothin’

Sound Bite

America's most challenged families are segregated into high-poverty schools. Despite a 20-year experiment in nationwide school reform, few students make it over the slippery bridge to the middle class. In this book you meet the students, families, teachers, and administrators who struggle inside this failed system, and consider proposals to give them a fighting chance.

About the Book

Using pseudonyms but real stories, Rossiter introduces the reader to fascinating students, families, teachers, and administrators who are caught up in a tragic cycle of poverty, dysfunction, and educational fraud. He shows why and how the result is half of the students dropping out and the other half graduating years behind and helpless before a community college curriculum.Rossiter then steps back and seeks solutions that would greatly increase the number of students making it to the promised land of the middle class. His solutions come from the same principle used by private schools and schools for wealthy families: build the school around the needs of the students. For high-poverty families, this means addressing the need to remain alive, healthy, and out of parenthood during the teenage years; it means building basic skills and then offering a real choice of college prep or vocational training,; it means separating students based on behavior and effort, so that the strong can achieve without disruption and the weak can received remediation and try again.Finally, Rossiter reviews efforts to address the underlying legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism that has created the culture of poverty. He offers solutions in this area as well, such as high-wage jobs programs for parents and programs that strengthen young families during pregnancy and then stimulate language development during the crucial first year of life.Diane Ravitch has analyzed the counter-productive school reform policies that guide today s public schools (The Death and Life of the Great American School System -- 2010) and public charter schools (Reign of Error -- 2013). Rossiter provides in-person details about the impact of those policies in the high-poverty public and charter high schools at which he taught. He illustrates issues such as fraudulent diplomas, driving away good teachers, the empty search for athletic scholarships, and the family challenges of living in a culture of poverty, by building a chapter for each issue around an actual student, parent, teacher, or administrator. Bringing the voices of the participants directly to the public, Rossiter evokes Jonathan Kozol s legendary work on high-poverty schools, Death at an Early Age (1967).He also offers a comprehensive solution that would allow millions more students to walk over the slippery bridge to the middle class.