LIVES ON THE BOUNDARY
The Struggles and Achievements
of America's Underprepared
Mike Rose
New York: The Free Press, 1989
255 pp., $22.95
Unlike the recent flash flood of books depicting the failures of American education in the 1980s, Mike Rose has written a success story--his personal success at overcoming the odds against acquiring an education and the all-too-limited successes of his students. Rose's story offers no formula, magical or otherwise, for reversing the awful downward spiral of quality in our schools and colleges; but it does show, by personal testimony, what thought, devotion, and effort are required to oppose that trend.
Whether it is the decline of humanistic knowledge, as described by Daine Ravitch and Chester Finn, Jr., in What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? or the failure of middle-school education, as recently reported by the Carnegie Foundation, study upon study documents woefully inadequate achievement by students at all levels--in history, literature, geography, mathematics, the sciences, and so forth.
Rose doesn't deny the statistical facts; rather, he asks, Why and how do individual students fail to live up to traditional expectations? What is the significance of their failures and underachievement? In what social context do failures occur? And what is to be done for students categorized by tests and measurements as underachievers or slow or remedial?
Mike Rose is associate director of Writing Programs at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He didn't get there easily. His own struggle to rise form the "educational underclass" gave him insight into that class itself, into the barriers and possibilities contained in each person faced with the huge task of education. It enabled him, among other things, to write this book and to open it with a sentence that reads, "This is a hopeful book about those who fail."
The son of Italian immigrants, Rose grew up in south Los Angeles, where he "developed a picture of human existence that rendered it short and brutish or sad and aimless or long and quiet." His parents believed in education, though they had little of it themselves.
Early in high school Rose's test scores got mixed up with another boy's of the same surname, and he was "placed in the vocational track, a euphemism for the bottom level." Much later, after teaching many students of varying ages and backgrounds, Rose learned that fortuitous events of many kinds can throw roadblocks into a person's journey toward literacy and education in general. American educators have a penchant for measuring, diagnosing, and classifying their students. Our educational method, Rose thinks, "blinds us to the true difficulties and inequities in the ways we educate our children."
Good teachers appear
Before completing high school, Rose pulled out of the particular inequity he had fallen into. Perhaps he would have drifted anyway, even if "classified" properly. But at the same
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