The World We Created at Hamilton High

The World We Created at Hamilton High is beautifully written, carefully researched, and continually insightful. With searing honesty Gerald Grant portrays the dilemmas of the schools today, especially those conditions that cause public schools to retreat behind a facade of bureaucratic legalism and to abandon the attempt to forge a sense of community. By looking closely and sensitively at one school, Grant places the policy debates and history of the past thirty-five years under his microscope. He has succeeded in writing a brilliant and provocative book. -- Diane Ravitch

In this evocative picture of an urban American high school and its successes and setbacks over 35 years, Grant works out a unique perspective on what makes a good school: one that asserts moral and intellectual authority without becoming rigidly doctrinaire or losing the precious gains in equality of opportunity that have been won at great cost.

In this wonderfully evocative picture of an urban American high school and its successes and setbacks over the past thirty-five years, Gerald Grant works out a unique perspective on what makes a good school: one that asserts moral and intellectual authority without becoming rigidly doctrinaire or losing the precious gains in equality of opportunity that have been won at great cost.

Grant describes what happened inside Hamilton High (a real school, although its identity is disguised), and how different worlds evolved as the school’s authority system was transformed. After the opening of Hamilton High in the buoyant and self-confident 1950s, the school plunged into a period of violence and radical deconstruction in the late sixties. Grant charts the rise of student power in the seventies, followed by new transformations of the school in the last decade occasioned in part by the mainstreaming of disabled students and the arrival of Asian immigrants. Things got very bad before they got better, but they did get better. The school went from white power to black power to genuine racial equality. Its average test scores declined and then improved. Although test-score means did not return to their former levels, the gap in achievement between the social classes decreased. Violence was replaced by a sense of relative safety and security.

Yet this book is not just a case study. In the second half the author presents a general analysis of American education. He contrasts the world of Hamilton High with other possible worlds, including those at three schools (one public and two private) that exhibit a strong positive ethos. He looks at the way the moral and intellectual worlds have been sundered in many contemporary public schools and asks whether they can be put back together again.

The book is grounded in a creative methodology that includes research by students at Hamilton High, whom Grant trained to analyze life in their...