In this current school year, more than 6,200 Teach for America corps members are teaching in America's neediest communities, reaching approximately 400,000 students. These books discuss the Teach for America experience and model or examine urban education in general.

Teach for America | Urban education

Teach for America

One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way
By Wendy Kopp
Not just a personal memoir, this is a blueprint for a new civil rights movement that demands educational access and opportunity for all American children.

Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America
By Donna Foote
Journalist Foote offers a revealing look inside a national phenomenon, Teach for America, which has pursued one of the most daring--and controversial--strategies for closing the educational achievement gap between the richest and poorest students in the country.

Taught by America: A Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton
By Sarah Sentilles
After graduating from Yale University, Sarah Sentilles joined the Teach for America program and began a two-year assignment as an elementary school teacher in Compton, California. Far from the hallowed halls of academe and the suburban streets where she grew up, in charge of thirty-six first graders in a classroom without books, Sentilles experienced her own kind of education. Taught by America is the story of the children Sentilles taught--but more than that, it's a story of one woman's change of heart and life.

Lessons to Learn: Voices from the Front Lines of Teach for America
By Molly Ness
A unique inside look at Teach for America. Combines interviews and essays from Teach for America members, alumni, school principals, superintendents, parents and noted education experts.

Urban education

Stand For the Best: What I Learned After Leaving My Job as CEO of H&R Block to Become a Teacher and Founder of an Inner-City Charter School
By Thomas M. Bloch
Twelve years ago, Bloch was CEO of H&R Block, the world's largest tax-preparation firm. After much soul-searching, he resigned to become a math teacher in a Kansas City inner-city school. Bloch tells what it was like struggling to make a difference to his students. Bloch spoke at the Library on August 28, 2008.

Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America
By Jay Mathews
When Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin signed up for Teach for America right after college and found themselves utter failures in the classroom, they vowed to remake themselves into superior educators. They did that--and more. In their early twenties, by sheer force of talent and determination never to take no for an answer, they created a wildly successful fifth-grade experience that would grow into the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which today includes sixty-six schools in nineteen states and the District of Columbia. Mathews spoke at the Library on February 19, 2009.

Making Schools Work: Improving Performance and Controlling Costs
By Eric Hanushek
This book is the culmination of extensive discussions among a panel of economists led by Eric Hanushek. In this book, economists conclude that economic considerations have been entirely absent from the development of educational policies and that economic reality is sorely needed in discussions of new policies. The panel outlines an improvement plan that emphasizes changing incentives in schools and gathering information about effective approaches. Hanushek spoke at the Library on January 22, 2009.

And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner-City High School Students
By Miles Corwin
Author and journalist Miles Corwin offers a masterfully reported and elegantly written chronicle of an exceptional inner-city high school class, Crenshaw High School in South Central Los Angeles.

The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools
By William G. Howell, Paul E. Peterson
The voucher debate has been both intense and ideologically polarizing, in good part because so little is known about how voucher programs operate in practice. In this book, William Howell and Paul Peterson report new findings drawn from a comprehensive study on vouchers.

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