An explosive new look at the pressures on today's teachers and the pitfalls of school reform, Confessions of a Bad Teacher presents a passionate appeal to save public schools, before it's too late.

When John Owens left a lucrative job to teach English at a public school in New York City's South Bronx, he thought he could do some good. Faced with a flood of struggling students, Owens devised ingenious ways to engage every

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In this powerful, eloquent story of his return to the classroom, a former teacher offers a rousing defense of his beleaguered vocation Perhaps no profession is so constantly discussed, regulated, and maligned by non-practitioners as teaching. The voices of the teachers themselves are conspicuously missing. Defying this trend, teacher and writer Garret Keizer takes us to school--literally--in this arresting account of his return to the same rural Vermont...

"From 1880 to 1940, ethnic Mexicans enrolled their children in both public schools and escuelitas (little schools)-"two contradictory educational traditions with mutually exclusive messages," Philis Barragán Goetz writes. Texas public school administrators believed that you could not live in the United States and be a citizen if you did not speak English and demonstrate a familiarity with the laws of the country. Mexican consuls and many upper class...