Being principal was never her dream. Anabel Garza, the young widow of a young cop, got by teaching English to immigrant children, taking college classes at night and raising her son.
And Reagan High was no dream assignment. Once famous for its state football championships, educational achievements and award-winning design, the school was a shadow of its former self. “Identified for improvement,” said the federal government. “Academically unacceptable,” said the state. Promising students were fleeing. Test scores were plunging. The education commissioner set a deadline of one year, threatening to close the school for good.
But when Anabel took the job – cruising the mall for dropouts, tailoring lessons to the tests, firing a few lazy teachers and supporting the rest – she started something no one expected. As the numbers rose, she set out to re-create the high school she remembered, with plays and dances, yearbooks and clubs, crowded bleachers and teachers who brought books alive.
And soon she was not alone. There was Derrick Davis, a star player on the basketball team in the early 1990s, coaching the Raiders toward a chance at the playoffs. There was Candice Kaiser, a science teacher who had left hard partying behind for Christ, drilling her students on chemistry while she drove them to games, tutoring sessions, Bible studies and sometimes even doctors’ appointments. There were JaQuarius Daniels, Ashley Brown and 900 other kids trying to pass the exams, escape the streets and restore the pride of a neighborhood, all while still growing up.
Across the country, public schools face the threat of extinction in the numerically ordained churn of the accountability movement. Now, for the first time, we can tally the human cost of rankings and scores. In this powerful rejoinder to the prevailing winds of American education policy, Michael Brick takes us inside the high-pressure world of a school on the brink. Compelling, character-driven narrative journalism, Saving the School pays overdue tribute to the great American high school, and to the people inside.
About Michael Brick
Michael Brick, a former The New York Times reporter and sportswriter, has written feature stories from Alaska to Brooklyn to Mexico, including contributions for the Pulitzer Prize-winning project Portraits of Grief. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Stacy, and their children. Inspired by Anabel Garza and the teachers at Reagan High, they’ve started a scholarship fund for students at the school. Information is available at www.savingtheschool.com.
Editorial Review
Opened in 1965 to great fanfare and team spirit, lauded by national leaders for its two state football championships in the late-’60s, John H. Reagan High School was beset by the classic concerns troubling much of the rest of the country’s public schools from the 1990s onward. A huge increase in English language learners, rotating teaching staff, a spike in school violence and dropout rates and alarming slumps in test scores branded Reagan with “the stigma of failure.” During the school year of 2009-2010, when Reagan was given one more chance to bring up test scores or face closure as part of the national get-tough approach to school reform headed by the new president, former New York Times reporter Brick immersed himself in the lives of the teachers and students at Reagan. He focuses especially on the formidable task faced by the school’s principal, Anabel Garza. Arriving onboard in 2008, Garza worked tirelessly to try to restore some of the lost luster to the neighborhood school. Raised in Brownsville, having struggled herself to build a career from hardscrabble beginnings, Garza employed a combination of hands-on mothering, hectoring and toughness, inspiring teachers to expect all of their students to pass the standardized tests. Overall, instilling a sense of personal responsibility within the larger student body seemed to be the heartening key to this school’s amazing success. – Kirkus Reviews
“Saving the School: The True Story of a Principal, a Teacher, a Coach, a Bunch of Kids and a Year in the Crosshairs of Education Reform” by Michael Brick
The Washington Post Book Review – August 24, 2012 (Excerpt)
Michael Brick’s “Saving the School” is a compelling, enlightening account of a school community rising to save itself in the unforgiving, data-driven, often nonsensical world bequeathed to public education by No Child Left Behind. Brick, a former New York Times writer, spent the 2009-10 school year chronicling the unrelenting efforts of Principal Anabel Garza, her staff and students to prevent Reagan High School in East Austin from being closed by the Texas Education Agency, which for four straight years had slapped Reagan with the label “academically unacceptable.” Without dramatic improvement in the scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills given in the spring of 2010, Reagan faced the prospect of being permanently closed and its students being shipped out of their neighborhood to other schools.
Raising test scores at Reagan was a daunting task. Like many schools across the country, including T.C. Williams in Alexandria, where I teach, Reagan had undergone enormous demographic changes over the past 25 years. In 1990, Reagan’s senior class was approximately 50 percent white, 30 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic. Since then, many middle-class families, white and black, had fled the community as impoverished families from Mexico and Central America poured in. By 2009, Reagan’s student body was 71 percent Hispanic, 26 percent black and 3 percent white; 88 percent of those kids were poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. [Read the full article...]
Advertisement
THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7
The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]
The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.
