The Schools We Have, the Schools We Want: An American Teacher on the Front Line

Writing from the educational trenches, the author of Why Do We Gotta Do This Stuff, Mr. Nehring? returns to his fictional Amesley Junior-Senior High School to examine the implementing of school-reform theories. A teacher at the Bethlehem High School in Delmar, N.Y., Nehring brings a refreshing voice to the discussion about what works in teaching, learning and institutional change. Set in a middle-class suburb and peopled with an instantly recognizable cast of administrators, teachers and students, Amesley High is ``a kind of Everyschool,'' haltingly responding to the calls for improvement in the public schools that echoed through the '80s. With humor, insight and respect for pragmatism, Nehring dramatizes the almost futile two-year effort of Amesley's team to put educational theory into practice. Nehring infuses familiar small-scale successes and bureaucratic impasses with a human dimension. (Oct.)