Kristina Rizga

In the week in which the results of key exams are published in the UK and we are watching about chinese education methods on TV I read this book and realised that in the US the situation is just the same. Written over five years, Rizga immersed herself in the life of Mission High School in San Francisco and in this book shows how the key purpose of education is different for different audiences. Mission High serves a deprived student body with over forty nationalities. For many of them getting to school each day is a challenge and staying in school to graduate is more unlikely. These are students who seem to have nothing to aim for but the ethos at Mission High is both inclusive and also aspirational - so many go on to college. However the US system of assessment fails these students as it measures progress by standardised tests rather than capability and that favours some students more than others. A pity that those in charge of education policy in the UK can't see this as well - an inspiring book which reaffirms why I went into teaching and why I still love the job despite the politics.… (mer)

The author spent four years observing at Mission High School in California, a school deemed “in trouble” based on standardized tests. However, the graduation and college acceptance rates defy this conclusion. Despite being made up of mainly minorities and English as second language students, somehow the staff here makes it work, and that includes the principal down to the teachers. The author provides great arguments against the common core multiple choice tests that don’t teach the skills students need in life to succeed but only the ability to memorize facts for a test. One interesting observation is the number of Chinese students who come here to study because the schools in their country, supposedly the greatest, do not feel they are adequate for their future success. I finally found a great book on education today!… (mer)

Put this on the syllabus

Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph by Kristina Rizga (Nation Books, $26.99).

As the education reporter for Mother Jones, Kristina Rizga has seen a lot of schools and talked to a plenty of experts. But perhaps the smartest thing she did was to focus on Mission High School in San Francisco, which had a population made up of poor and non-English-speaking students, as well as some of the lowest test scores in the country.

That might seem like a guaranteed recipe for failure, but, as Rizga clearly documents in Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It a Triumph, there’s always more to the story than the basic facts.

What was going to be an eight month reporting trip turned into four years, and Rizga did old-school immersion journalism, following a cohort of students and watching to see what worked and what didn’t. What she found is that a skills-based model—like the one used in workplace evaluations—gets results, and that it’s not the kids and the teachers who are failing. It’s the rest of us.

Mission High ought to be on the syllabus for everyone who is concerned about American education, and required reading for those who are actually involved in education and education reform.

(Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com)… (mer)