Summary
Geraldlynn is a lively, astute 14-year-old. Her family, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, returns home to find a radically altered public education system. Geraldlynn's parents hope their daughter's new school will prepare her for college--but the teenager has ideals and ambitions of her own. Aidan is a fresh-faced Harvard grad drawn to New Orleans by the possibility of bringing change to a flood-ravaged city. He teaches at an ambitious charter school with a group of newcomers determined to show the world they can use science, data, and hard work to build a model school. Mary Laurie is a veteran educator who becomes principal of one of the first public high schools to reopen after Katrina. Laurie and her staff find they must fight each day not only to educate the city's teenagers, but to keep the Walker community safe and whole. In this powerful narrative non-fiction debut, the lives of these three characters provide readers with a vivid and sobering portrait of education in twenty-first-century America. Hope Against Hope works in the same tradition as Random Family and There Are No Children Here to capture the challenges of growing up and learning in a troubled world.
Author Notes
Sarah Carr has written about education for the last twelve years, reporting on the growth in online learning in higher education, the battle over vouchers and charter schools in urban districts, and the struggle to educate China's massive population of migrant children. Her work has been honored with numerous national awards and fellowships, most recently a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at Columbia University. She lives in New Orleans.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Aiming to distill the difficulties and possibilities facing American educational reform, journalist Carr follows three people at three charter schools-14-year-old student Geraldlynn Stewart, idealistic young teacher Aidan Kelly, and dedicated principal Mary Laurie-as they navigate competing visions of education and civil rights in post-Katrina New Orleans. While the book's time period (2005-2012) sees a general if qualified upswing in student performance, Carr still finds the city, for all its unique history, emblematic of a continuing national crisis of "decayed infrastructure, overwhelmed social services, long-simmering racial tensions, and gross inequalities." Her protagonists' perspectives capture subtleties rarely probed in a national debate more preoccupied with test scores, corporatization, and teachers' unions: discipline, gun violence, and the unmet needs of students facing a wide range of physical and mental problems. Carr, for her part, critiques the increasingly prevalent charter school system, which now serves roughly two million students, for its paternalism, unforgiving "no-excuses" approach, and rigidly college-oriented ethos. Her scholastic prescription is holistic, understanding and embracing the wider social circumstances of a child's learning process by balancing quality teaching against the self-determination and cultural values of that child's particular community. Agent: Farley Chase, Farley Literary. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with so many schools destroyed and destabilized, New Orleans was viewed as fertile ground for educational reform. Charter schools, staffed mostly by young teachers new to the area, rushed to fill the void in a city whose public schools had long been failing. Education reporter Carr chronicles the lives of students and faculty at three charter high schools, Walker, Sci Academy, and KIPP Renaissance, as they struggled to meet mounting expectations for academic performance. Carr focuses on Geraldlynn, a high-school freshman; idealistic teacher Aidan, a Harvard grad who struggled to keep pace with the ambitious goals set for the school; and Mary Laurie, a New Orleans native and veteran teacher, who became principal of one of the first public schools to reopen after Katrina. Carr deftly explores the complexities of school reform and the tensions between newcomers unfamiliar with the culture of New Orleans and educators and parents suspicious of their intent. But Carr goes beyond New Orleans to examine the broader issues of education reform in urban areas throughout the nation as students and parents are caught in a clash of cultures and ideas on how to repair failing school systems and educate inner-city children.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Carr, a journalist, presents a nonfiction narrative account of the deeply complex nature of school reform at three high schools as experienced by a student, a teacher, and a principal. Using the backdrop of post-Katrina New Orleans, Carr explores the challenges of truly educating all children in the US. Through observations and interviews, Carr tells the stories of participants' motivations, concerns, and day-to-day lives as they seek educational improvement. This journalistic account explores controversial reforms such as privatizing efforts, charter schools, Teach for America, and the use of data to measure student and teacher progress. Carr's book reminds the reader that school improvement is the story of people and concludes that the approach to reform must attend to the breadth and depth of the challenges facing poor children in and outside school while honoring the culture, value, and history of students and families through a community-based orientation. Moreover, Carr argues that reformers should take a bottom-up approach to understanding education policy and assessing its impact by examining how people and communities experience teaching and learning. Readers will be interested in the map identifying the three schools, the many quotations and observations, photographs of the three main characters, explanatory notes, and the selected bibliography. --Pixita Maria del Prado Hill, SUNY Buffalo State
Kirkus Review
Education reporter Carr debuts with a balanced account of the growing charter-school movement in post-Katrina New Orleans. Deftly weaving in background on the abysmal historical performance of New Orleans public schools and the strong focus on discipline and routine of charter schools aimed at preparing students for college, the author shows how the charter approach is working on the ground through the eyes of individuals in three randomly selected schools: 14-year-old Geraldlynn Stewart, who struggles to find her way as a high school student; Aidan Kelly, a 24-year-old teacher and Harvard graduate who sees his school as an academic boot camp; and Mary Laurie, veteran principal of one of the first schools to reopen after Katrina, who asks students, "Would you come along with me on this journey?" Their closely reported experiences in schools of the national chain KIPPS (Knowledge Is Power Program) illustrate the issues, challenges and satisfactions of the demanding, no-excuses charter way. Like the other charters, Sci Academy, where Aidan teaches, emphasizes success on standardized tests; it is "a technocrat's dream: run by graduates of the nation's most elite institutions, steeped in data, always seeking precision, divorced from the messinessof democracy." With their missionary zeal and outsider status, its young teachers "resemble the settlement house workers of a century ago," writes Carr. Principal Laurie hopes her students will journey on to college; Geraldlynn's parents, too, hope the new charter schooling will open a longed-for door. While often repetitive, the book evokes the realities of a city school system in transition. The schools are improving and test scores are up, she writes, but only college graduation rates in future years will tell whether charters make a difference. Detailed and thoughtful.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Hurricane Katrina, while devastating, provided New Orleans with a unique opportunity to completely overhaul its public school system. Two years prior to the disaster, in an effort to improve the state's low-performing school rating, Louisiana created the Recovery School District, which acquired all but 17 of the state's schools. In her book, education reporter Carr follows Geraldlynn Aidan, and Mary Laurie, to chronicle their varied perspectives on how the educational system functioned both before and after the hurricane. Geraldlynn is a 14-year-old student who lived briefly in Houston while New Orleans recovered, Aidan is an eager young teacher working hard to make a difference in the lives of his students, and Mary Laurie is a school administrator who was selected to lead one of the first high schools to reopen following Katrina. Their struggles and victories show some of what's wrong and what's right with urban education today and specifically with the choices the school district made after the hurricane. VERDICT Laissez les bons temps rouler! Yes, New Orleans is a city like no other, and Carr demonstrates how its unique character has both helped and hindered its educational recovery. Many questioned whether or not the city could survive after Katrina, and survived it has, but only time will tell whether the schools endure the storm. [See African American Perspectives for Black History Month, LJ 11/1/12.]-Terry Christner, Hutchinson P.L., KS (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.