Book helps promote better teaching in schools

When Rethinking Schools got its start, the publication "was little more than a collection of typewritten articles about to be pasted up on a kitchen table as we rushed to meet our printer's deadline," the editors of "Rethinking Schools: An Agenda for Change" recall in the recently released book.

The 284-page softcover is a collection of the best of Rethinking Schools, the education quarterly that's been cranking out alternative views on education for the past eight years.

Local readers will find the familiar voices of Bob Peterson, one of the publication's editors and a fifth-grade teacher at La Escuela Fratney; Cynthia Ellwood, one of the quarterly's founding editors and now the education director for Milwaukee Public Schools; and Barbara Miner, a former Milwaukee Journal reporter who is on staff at Rethinking Schools.

But readers also will find viewpoints from people such as Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates Jr., writing about multiculturalism; historian Howard Zinn, writing about the importance of teaching history; and teacher Lenore Gordon, writing on homophobia in the classroom.

"We're worried when Johnny can't read," Gates writes in the book's first selection, setting the tone for the collection. "We're worried when Johnny can't add. But shouldn't we be worried, too, when Johnny tramples gravestones in a Jewish cemetery or scrawls racial epithets on a dormitory wall?"

Although Rethinking Schools had published works in-house, its latest effort is the first time its work has been published by an outside publisher The New Press, of New York.

"For me, because it's a collection of things we've done, it's kind of a milestone," said Rita Tenorio, who co-edited the book along with Peterson, Robert Lowe and David Levine. "It says we have come to a certain point in our development."

Peterson said he hopes the book will enable Rethinking Schools to institutionalize some of the thoughts that have appeared on the quarterly's pages over the years.

Copyright 1995
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