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THE PRIZE

Name: THE PRIZE
Author: Dale Russakoff
ISBN: 978-0-547-84005-5

WHO'S IN CHARGE OF AMERICA'S SCHOOLS?

by Dale Russakoff ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2015

An absorbing entry into the burgeoning genre about necessary education reforms.

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The story of Chris Christie, Cory Booker, Mark Zuckerberg, and the $100 million grant for fixing New Jersey—and possibly all American—schools.

Go back five years, before Booker moved on from his post as mayor of Newark to join Congress; before Christie had fumbled his momentum over some petty payback involving a bridge; before…well, OK, Zuckerberg was already plenty wealth—wealthy and interested in finding a way to enable major shifts in education reform. Booker was a popular mayor, and Christie was a popular governor. Both had aspirations for higher office, and both wanted to get there by instituting major change in New Jersey. So what better arena than the school system of Newark, with its vertigo-inducing rates of dropouts, crumbling school buildings, and shameful academic standings? In her first book, expanded from a serialized New Yorker article, former Washington Post reporter Russakoff tells the story of how Christie leveraged his political power, Booker provided the charisma and inspiring speeches, and together they netted Zuckerberg and a $100 million donation. They raised money from other donors, as well, predicting a battle against entrenched interests on both sides of the aisle intent on maintaining the status quo: unionized teachers and an entire industry of “educational consultant experts” moving from district to district, ostensibly “fixing” many of the problems through trainings, incentive programs, and other initiatives that would, as Christie and Booker noted, serve only to reinforce efforts in directions that had proven ineffective. Russakoff digs deep into the story, examining the seemingly well-intentioned efforts to bring change; the “good-news publicity storm” that Booker mastered, raising his profile while neglecting his responsibilities; Zuckerberg’s amazingly shortsighted faith in the level of control the politicians wielded; and the families caught up in the whirlwind, trying to find a reason to believe in the government’s plans for their schools. An appendix lists all the recipients of the grant money and other funds.

An absorbing entry into the burgeoning genre about necessary education reforms.

Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-547-84005-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.