A nice person
At the end of her book Sarah Lightfoot confesses that "the social scientist engaged in portraiture should recognize the potential impact of the work on inidviduals and institutions." Encapsulated within that sentence are most of the things that made me dislike this book.
Ms. Lightfoot wanted desperately to find 'good' in American high schools. She traveled from New Engliand to the Midwest to ferret out this goodness. She openly states that she doesn't care for the negativity that so many writers display in their books and articles about the US secondary education system. She was determined to find good people doing good things. She found them.
Unfortunately the reader is left, after reading "The Good High School" with hundreds of doubts, reservations and questions. Occasionally Ms. Lightfoot peers down dark corridors at the schools she visits; she hints that not everyone is happy, contented, dedicated professionals. But just as she spots potential trouble she quickly steers her narrative back to the sanguine, uplifting, hopeful fairy tale she set out to write.
In Sarah's world all teachers are divided into three groups: bad, good and 'stars'. She reveals that some of the schools she visited steered her to the latter group yet she doesn't seem to find this unsettling. And never does she dare to nuance her judgments about teachers. Could it be that a teacher could be a 'star' in the eyes of administrators and something less to some of his or her students? Could a teacher be good at discipline but bad at pedagogy; a star when it comes to honors students but a chump with non-college-bound kids? Sarah doesn't say. Such distinctions would spoil the nice, two-dimensional (good and evil) world she lives in.
You won't be surprised that the only person who comes in for unmitigated criticism in this book is Jonathan Kozol. She makes no reference to writers like John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Herbert Kohl or Frank Smith. None is listed in her bibliography. She relates in her last chapter that the book is "portraiture' based on research with an aim toward objectivity, yet no data is produced and little or no supporting evidence is ever given for her assessments of the people and institutions she evaluates.
Sarah Lightfoot is a nice person, obviously. I recommend her for the job of paving the road to hell. She'd be a natural.
An inspiration for shaping organizational change.
Sara Lightfoot is an incredible author that writes with style, candor and vividness that allows one to experience the context as though he/she is actually involved rather than examining the process vicariously. The author recognizes that it is important for readers to be able to place these high schools in context, visualize the terrain, the community and the people. Lightfoot has done this by working through the inside out, much like an artist painting a portrait capturing the essence of truth with a myriad of dimensions. Lightfoot offers a penetrable look inside high schools whhile exploring the inherent goodness of schools. She provides a description of "goodness" as not being static nor an absolute quality that can be measured as a single indicator of success of effectiveness but a mixture of parts that produce the whole. This mixture encompasses less tangible, more elusive qualities that can only be discerned through close, vivid description, through subtle nuances, and thhrough detailed narratives that reveal the sustaining values of an institution. A quality that is evident of Lightfoot throughout the text is that she looks for the"good" in all six schools,even though they are not equal. All too often, rersearchers get caught up in identifying a cause or over-emphasining the negeative aspects while allowing the "good" qualities to go unnoticed. Lightfoot goes the extra mile is this respect by bringing forth the good in each school. It is through work such as this that researchers can learn many transferable lessons that can be utilized in a wide array of research studies. With this in mind, I give Sara Lightfoot's book, The Good High School, a five star rating.
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