Getting What We Ask for: The Ambiguity of Success and Failure in Urban Education: 12 (Contributions to the Study of Education, 12) - Tapa dura

"This text offers a scholarly, in-depth analysis of urban education that provides insights into its current failures while suggesting policies and practices to make it more effective in the future. Payne ... questions conventional attitudes and approaches to urban education. ... This well-written text contains extensive footnotes, references, and an index. It compares favorably with quality studies concerned with the problems confronting urban education. Highly recommended for the general public and students at the community college and lower- and upper-division undergraduate levels."-Choice "In order to determine why today's approaches to problems in urban education seem ineffective, Payne analyzes the ideas of a number of comtemporary social scientists and educators. He then reports his own impressions gained from observation and interviewing at a typical inner-city high school in Chicago. He discovered that failure is not always unattractive to people suffering from it, nor is success so unambiguously appealing. The book ends on a hopeful note as he describes successes, however small, that hold a potential for improvement. Payne's review of the literature is thoroughly documented, his research painstakingly carried out, and his theories are stated lucidly. An important book for those involved with the struggle for educational equality."-Library Journal ?This text offers a scholarly, in-depth analysis of urban education that provides insights into its current failures while suggesting policies and practices to make it more effective in the future. Payne ... questions conventional attitudes and approaches to urban education. ... This well-written text contains extensive footnotes, references, and an index. It compares favorably with quality studies concerned with the problems confronting urban education. Highly recommended for the general public and students at the community college and lower- and upper-division undergraduate levels.?-Choice ?In order to determine why today's approaches to problems in urban education seem ineffective, Payne analyzes the ideas of a number of comtemporary social scientists and educators. He then reports his own impressions gained from observation and interviewing at a typical inner-city high school in Chicago. He discovered that failure is not always unattractive to people suffering from it, nor is success so unambiguously appealing. The book ends on a hopeful note as he describes successes, however small, that hold a potential for improvement. Payne's review of the literature is thoroughly documented, his research painstakingly carried out, and his theories are stated lucidly. An important book for those involved with the struggle for educational equality.?-Library Journal ?If you are not very familiar with inner city schools and what can be done to improve them, Getting What We Ask For provides an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with this important topic. Payne's book ... provides an outstanding analysis of the problems and prospects for improvement in inner city schools and, in many ways, in other inner city institutions as well. ... [It] is based on a solid theoretical foundation, which proves both instructive and practical. In addition, Payne's book also is eminently readable. The reader is given plenty of the horror stories that one expects to encounter in descriptions of inner city schools, but this is done in a constructive context that also lays out the possibilities and directions for productive change, in a manner sympathetic to both the students and the teachers who have been the victims of institutional dysfunction in the inner city.?-Children and Youth Services Review "If you are not very familiar with inner city schools and what can be done to improve them, Getting What We Ask For provides an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with this important topic. Payne's book ... provides an outstanding analysis of the problems and prospects for improvement in inner city schools and, in many ways, in other inner city institutions as well. ... [It] is based on a solid theoretical foundation, which proves both instructive and practical. In addition, Payne's book also is eminently readable. The reader is given plenty of the horror stories that one expects to encounter in descriptions of inner city schools, but this is done in a constructive context that also lays out the possibilities and directions for productive change, in a manner sympathetic to both the students and the teachers who have been the victims of institutional dysfunction in the inner city."-Children and Youth Services Review

yne /f Charles /i M.