In evocative prose and telling anecdotes, the author of Lives on the Boundary recreates the classrooms he visited in a four-year journey through America's public schools. Rose shows readers how teachers work, how children learn, and what schools do for their neighborhoods. In the process, he offers new hope that by bringing out the best in public education, we can revitalize ourselves as a nation.

"This big-shouldered book, full of ardor...offers us a reasonable hope that with attention and care we can again make public education what it was meant to be, and must yet be."--The Los Angeles Times.