The street stops here

""There are two Harlems," observes Patrick J. McCloskey in this engrossing narrative. "One bursts with new hope, while the other has remained marooned on the edge of the mainstream for generations." The problem, he asserts, is the enormous difficulty urban minority children face in getting a quality education. The Street Stops Here offers a deeply personal and compelling account of this struggle in a controversial setting, a Catholic high school in central Harlem, where mostly disadvantaged (and often non-Catholic) African American young men graduate on time and get into college. Interweaving vivid portraits of day-to-day school life with clear and even-handed analysis, McCloskey takes us through an eventful year at Rice High School, as staff, students, and families make heroic efforts to prevail against society's negative expectations. McCloskey's riveting narrative brings into sharp relief an urgent public policy question: whether (and how) to save these schools, which provide the only educational hope for thousands of poor and working-class students - and thus fulfill a crucial public mandate. Just as significantly, The Street Stops Here offers invaluable lessons for low-performing urban public schools."--Jacket.