City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row

by William Ayers (Editor), Patricia Ford (Editor)

A classic collection exploding the stereotypes of city schools.

City Kids, City Teachers —now reissued with a new introduction by William Ayers that reflects on how improving urban education is more essential than ever—has become a touchstone for urban educators, exploding the stereotypes of teaching in the city. In more than twenty-five provocative selections, set in context by Ayers and Patricia Ford, an all-star cast of educators and writers explores the surprising realities of city classrooms from kindergarten through high school. Contributors including Gloria Ladson-Billings, Lisa Delpit, June Jordan, Lewis Lapham, Audre Lorde, and Deborah Meier move from the poetic to the practical, celebrating the value of city kids and their teachers. It is a useful guide as well as a call to action for anyone who teaches or has taught in the city, for those considering teaching in urban schools, and for every parent with children in our schools today.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

345 pages, Paperback

First published April 17, 1996

About the author

William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired), education activist, and bestselling author of Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom (with Rick Ayers), To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Third Edition, and To Teach: The Journey, in Comics (with Ryan Alexander-Tanner).

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved this book, and i'm super glad I read it. Some of it was outdated, mostly because I'm reading it about 20 years after its original publication, but most of the content on urban education is still relevant and useful. It was also a great reference to other works with similar ideology. Some of the pedagogical articles were a bit challenging to wade through, but the pieces that were written as stories, or first hand accounts of incidents, were amazingly powerful. I also loved that there were two student-created tests in there. They did a great job of showing how cultural bias is so pervasive in testing. This was definitely an issue that, even though this book was written in the 90s, is still going on and prevalent today. In some ways, this book was depressing because of that. It's 20 years old, so all this information should be outdated, and reading it should be a reflection of how far we've come. Instead, it's disheartening because two more generations of children have graduated from the public school system, and we're still facing the same challenges that we were 20, 30, even 50 years ago.
Regardless, these stories were all interesting to read and there were several that got me all emotionally invested in the critters again. Stuff like this is good to read every so often to keep you going when the teacher burnout looms near.

[Yasmin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up the other day at Myopic Books. I think the essays I found most useful were the ones I'd already read (Lisa Delpit and Martin Haberman).