Books That Made a Difference

School Administrator, June, 1998

The School Administrator asked several current and former superintendents who were known to be prolific readers to identify a book that has had a powerful impact on their thinking as it applies to running a school system or educating children.

The assignment allowed them to select any book they had encountered during their lifetimes so long as the ideas still had a resonating effect.

As readers will note, same reached back to their formative years for a title while a few had difficulty narrowing down their choices.

Information on how to order the works they picked appears on page 14.

Ramon Cortines

Waiting for a Miracle by James P. Comer

Few books that I have read sum up the lessons of both a life and a career as successfully as does James Comer's Waiting for a Miracle (Dutton, 1997). At the end of his book, Comer summarizes these lessons by saying, "Schools can't solve our problems, but we can." His lessons resonate with my own experience and my work as a teacher, principal and district administrator.

Comer, a child psychiatrist and member of the Yale medical school faculty for 30 years, begins the book by describing his own upbringing in a caring family with high expectations for their children and tough but fair discipline to reinforce those expectations. He goes on to tell how his childhood development served him as he moved through his schooling and into his professional career.

Generalizing from his life story, Comer describes three interrelated networks, all of which must function well for the individual to realize his or her potential. The first is the network of family and friends, churches and clubs that nurture a child from the dependency of infancy through the increasing independence and responsibility of adolescence and early adulthood. The second is the network of school and workplace. The third network, he says, is made up of "policies and practices established by business, political and other leaders."

Much of Comer's career has been devoted to connecting the first and second networks. His School Development Program, now being implemented in 650 schools across the country, has been particularly successful in building a partnership between parents, administrators and teachers that is devoted to creating the conditions under which children can learn and grow successfully.

When he turns his attention to the second and third networks--schools, the workplace and the policy environment in which they operate--Comer reminds us of two pervasive myths that continue to undermine confidence in the idea that all children can be successful learners.

One of them is the myth that white people are successful and people of color are not. The other is that success is exclusively the result of genetically determined intelligence and will.

The first of these myths is relatively easy to dispel, as Comer does when he cites the successful careers of African-American leaders in many fields. The second is more difficult to attack because it is so fundamental to our culture of individualism. That culture leads us to believe that individuals succeed because they are bright and driven. It also leads us to believe the inverse of that idea: If individuals fail, it is because they lack intelligence and drive. In doing so, it utterly ignores the role that opportunity or its absence plays in individual success or failure.

Comer argues that we must begin to engage in what he calls "human capital development" to ensure that opportunities are available where they are needed. Human capital must indeed be developed in the home, the community, the workplace and the civic realm. It is critically important that it also be developed in our schools.

For individuals to realize their potential, they must be given the opportunity to learn well. That opportunity will only be available when there are high and rising expectations for academic achievement in place for everyone involved in schooling--for students, of course, but also for parents, teachers, administrators, board members, government officials, policymakers and legislators at every level.

As Comer so wisely points out, it's not a miracle that will solve our problems. Rather, it's high expectations and hard work.

Ramon Corlines is interim director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, Box 1985, Providence, R.I. 02912. He is former chancellor of New York City Public Schools and superintendent in San Francisco, Calif.

Thomas McGarry

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

I love books because they lure me to think beyond my current borders. Of all I've read, the most provocative--the one that opened me to the perilous world of unimagined possibility--was Paulo Fre ire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Herder and Herder, 1972).

In 1972 I was a traditionally trained physics teacher doing postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland so I could gain an administrative credential in education. I was a teacher balking at the constraints of bureaucracy, an unfocused reformer trying to do what I thought was right for kids and learning.