This gracefully written book tells an adventure story. It's set in the late 60s and early 70s, the time of the Great Society when hopes were high for breaking down barriers of Class and Race. It's full of unforgettable characters : Parents who live in East Harlem, near the market under the train tracks, and teachers and other people who come from outside the community and soon are engaged in learning how to work within it. Very relevant to the present day challenges of teaching and parenting.

With the start of the school year approaching, there is no better time to learn from the men and women whose struggles are documented in this wonderfully written book. The account of their journey to create better schools and better futures for the children in their community is both engaging and inspiring.

This is an exceptional book. I'm not an educator and found it spell binding. What I found most extraordinary was that, against so many odds, there were so many successes and that the school continues. The efforts of the families and teachers is humbling. One of the outstanding aspects of the book is the description of the way in which issues of class were confronted and dealt with. This seems to be an issue over which many well-intentioned efforts to change "the system" stumble. This account offers valuable insight as to how such challenges must be met. This book is of great value to anyone concerned with social change. It's also well written, which is a treat.

This is a story of children, real children, still soft inside, and yet with a force field that can put off both the kindest and the most brutal attacks one can inflict. It is a story of a justice system long gone amuck, but often with good intentions, and some surprisingly good people lighting up the corners. Ayers is a good tale-teller, and catches students at the juvenile detention "home" in Chicago - it could just as well be many other places - in moments of anger, despair, humor, joy, self-deception and learning, along with the teachers that carefully try to offer regularity, challenge and choice. For those many to whom juveniles and juvenile detention facilities are not real, this book is a must. For those who know, it will be a renewed inspiration and challenge. For those who want to look further than Ayers points at a the development of our justice system and really systemic changes in the way we handle wrongs, both adult and juvenile, a great place to start would be Howard Zehr's, _Changing Lenses: A New Focus on Crime and Justice_.

Ayers book should be read by all educators who work with young people forgotten by the system. His case studies are brilliantly drawn and teach us a great deal about "juvenile justice". It has provoked discussion of poverty, violence, and social change. It has changed the thinking of many of my students for its clarity, insight, and hope.

I am a principal in an urban school district and I found Blake's words to ring so true--urban girls are an especially "silenced" and misunderstood group. I think all urban teachers and administrators should read this book to learn how we can learn more about the students we teach. Blake shows us how we can, through writing in the classroom, actually help students to think of alternatives to violence.

A timely and well-written book! Highly recommended!

Bravo to William Schubert and William Ayers, for helping to validate the "insight and understanding" (p. vii) teachers bring to the world of education! Teachers need to take the reflective insights gained in the confides of their classrooms and help "give rise to communities of teachers who learn more from each other through writing, reading, listening, talking, and most of all reflecting" (p. 10). Every teacher who has a story to tell should read this book and follow its example!

I emphatically agree with the book's central message: Small schools are greatly preferable to large. (I went through public school in L.A.; I should know.)

The book gives many wonderful examples of how small schools have revolutionized education in a number of places where public schools had been failing their students. The authors were among those dedicated enough to see through the building, running, and nurturing of such places of learning.

The book also gave a glimpse of what education is meant to be-- intense investigation, asking endless series of questions addressing issues of student interest, a process of learning for teacher as well as student--and contrasted this with what goes on in a typical factory-model school. Hurrah!

Unfortunately, the book made two glaring omissions (thus the four stars, not five). First, there was extremely little discussion of the resources needed to make this happen, and the corresponding lack of political will. It is easy to point out that wealthy school districts think $12,000 a student-year is an appropriate amount to spend for top-flight education, and that the special needs of poor districts suggest that even more is needed there. (And this is still mostly using the factory- model school for middle and high school.) But it is another thing altogether to develop a political strategy to deal with the discrepancies.

Second, I believe that the factory-model school is actually failing almost everyone, not just the poor in the city. Ideals of education are met no better in Novato, CA, than in Oakland. School is an impersonal waste of time in Novato, too. Issues of social justice are nowhere on the radar screen there, either. Kids go to "civics" class, biology, etc. Curriculum never changes, kids do not get to develop major educational programs based on their interests.

We need to find ways of encouraging everyone to engage in a discussion of social justice. Reagan and his welfare queen, Bush and Willie Horton, and years of perverse race-based criminal justice approaches (most notably the war on drugs), have set us back immeasurably. Milton Friedman has won; all the progressive tax systems are being whittled back; social services--from health care to welfare to, you guessed it, public education--are on the out.

Everyone should be in on this mission. I think the book speaks far too narrowly to the inner city and not broadly enough. (An important question here is whether we are asking city schools to perform wildly different functions from suburban schools, and if so, whether this is serving either of these populations.)

I had to read this book for a class I am attending in college. I, at first had a difficult time reading this book. It seemed to skip around a bit and not really flow consistantly. Once I finally got into reading it, I found it to be interesting. It discussed a variety of topics from Black English to teaching a diverse group of students. I would say that people planning to teach school or parents who have children in schools that are in the middle of larger cities and have lots of diversity should read this book.

I am a student at Macon State College. I had to read the book "City Kids, City Teachers" for my education class. I, being an early childhood development major found this book very interesting and enlightening. It gives people a look at very different children from all different kinds of backgrounds and gives you insight into their lives and personal struggles. It also gives very good advice to teachers on how to handle different situations. I recommend this book to anyone considering becoming a teacher.

First of all, I am a college student majoring in education and read this book for one of my classes. Personally, I thought that the book was excellent. It was packed with good, feasible suggestions on how to not only teach children from different backgrounds but how to learn from them also. It stated plainly that we all need to take into account and draw from their experiences and see them as "children of value" rather than "children at risk." I highly recommend this book for any teacher.

It beggars belief that an unrepentant home-grown terrorist--a man who dedicated himself to the violent overthrow of a free society (imperfect, yes, but far preferable to anything else in the real world)should be presented as some kind of model for the young. Ayers has never apologized for the ugly murderous counsel he offered the young in his previous incarnation--and now he presumes to tell us something about teaching? What kind of idiocy is it that leads anyone to take him seriously? His book, like his life, is an embarrassment and, after the horrors of September 11, a disgrace. Reason and decency should prevail over the kind of Utopian ideology that leads terrorists to believe their vision should be enforced by violence.

I am taking teacher certification classes and this book was assigned reading in a class which discussed what it means to be a teacher. On the positive side, there are a few helpful, practical ideas for the classroom teacher, and a few insights that any teacher should ponder (i.e. how should we as teachers view our students). That being said, however, it really galls me that I had to buy this book and contribute to the wealth of a cynical, unrepentant terrorist and then read page after page on how caring he is, how insightful, how gentle. It makes me tired and irritated. Surely there must be better books out there on teaching.

Ayers takes us on a journey unlike any other yet, with glimpses of ourselves as students and as teachers. Concepts, ideas and rememberances encapsulated in this book reveal the heart of a teacher who recognizes his own imperfections and shares his lessons learned. This book is insightful, intellectual reading that I would recommend to parents of school-aged children, prospective teachers, new teachers, veteran teachers and teacher-educators. This is a book I believe will become a teaching classic. Reading this book and Crossing Over Canaan will give readers some real-life insights of what it means to be a teachers in public schools. This is an excellent book!

This was a pretty good book. It was very interesting. I talked a lot about concentration camps and extermination camps. The best part of the book was that it had personal stories of people who survived and people that were killed. It had mny interesting facts about how many people died in certain camps. You should read this book!!!

For a political conservative like myself, there is no better propaganda than people like Billy Ayers. An unrepentant terrorist who spent much of the late 1960s and early 1970s planting bombs around the country attempts to explain how the Vietnam War made him do it. As a teacher of college undergraduates, I find this work invaluable as a depiction of an important (if often whitewashed) face of the New Left. (My low rating is based on an estimate of the intrinsic worth of the book; its social/political utility is far greater.)

Unlike a previous poster, I am not a conservative. I am a liberal. Nevertheless, I found this self-serving awkwardly "literary" memoir to be highly repugnant. Ayers, an unrepentant domestic terrorist who by his actions helped spawn a wave of bombings, armed robberies, and other terrorist acts that lasted into the 1980s and resulted in numerous deaths, spends half his time avoiding unpleasant truths and the other half attempting to weave a clumsily poetic romanticized version of the 60s and the counterculture.

The Weather Underground was a terrorist organization and many of its members--at least those who did not kill themselves while making bombs--still deserve to be in jail. Ayers and his wife and fellow terrorist largely escaped the consequences of their illegal and immoral actions, and now he apparently will turn them to profit with this book.

If you have to read this book, if you absolutely have to, let me borrow from Abbie Hoffman and urge you to steal rather than buy it.

Educator Bill Ayers was once on the FBI's Most Wanted list for terrorist activities during the 60s. He and his wife, Bernadette Dohrn, lived as fugitives for 10 years. The writing is good and tight and very engaging, but there's a self-serving quality to the story-line, and somehow I just don't get the feeling that I'm getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
Ayers story was at its best and most engaging during the first two thirds and then lost its hold on me once the bombing in Greenwich Village occurred and they went on the run>
Worthwhile, but I'm not sure it'll stand the test of time.

Boring -- Don't waste your money folks! I thought I was going to read some great things in critical pedagogy! The title should have been "...and unfocused rantings." She tries to make these "words" or "phrases of wisdom" and all they are is nonsense. They are so high falutin' I didn't get it and this is my favorite subject!!! or were they just stupid rantings. I can not express how terribly dissapointed I was. I'll never pick up another book by her. One star is the lowest I could go, if there was a 0 rating I would have used that!