SWEATING THE SMALL STUFF

by David Whitman

The most exciting innovation in education policy in the last decade is the emergence of highly effective schools in our nation's inner cities, schools where disadvantaged teens make enormous gains in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0615214088
• ISBN13: 9780615214085
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Length: 386 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Just a Tip

This book is now avaliable online for FREE through the Fordham Institute. I just downloaded it. Save yourself the $80+ bucks some of these merchants are trying to squeeze out of you.

The Search For Common Demoninators

The achievement gap between white students and African American/Latino students is one our country's greatest tragedies. However, there are a few remarkable schools that have closed this achievement gap. In "Sweating the Small Stuff" education writer David Whitman examines six of the best schools and searches for commonalities between the schools. His goal is to extract "truths" that can help influence the course of our country's education debate. At its core, this book is fascinating look into why these six schools succeed. Towards the end of the book, Whitman produces a list of twenty lessons that can be learned from these schools. In turn, he groups these lessons under the loaded term of, "New Paternalism". Whitman makes a strong argument as to why this term is correct. Unfortunately, "paternalism" is a such a loaded concept that is easy to become fixated on the word and lose track of the lessons Whitman has extracted from his research. The education achievement gap is a real problem and it will not go away by tinkering on the margins of the current system. Significant changes will be needed and these six schools are helping lead the way. I found this book to be well written and many of Whitman's arguments to be compelling. I would especially recommended this book for anyone thinking of opening up a new charter school. Highly recommended.

Raises Some Interesting Points

In the book, Whitman details the strategies of 6 high-performing inner-city schools: 4 charter, 1 neighborhood, and 1 private (American Indian Public Charter School, Amistad Academy, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, KIPP Academy, The SEED School, and University Park Campus School). He concludes that they all have one thing in common: they are highly paternalistic. In other words, all of these schools go to great lengths to manage every little detail of students' lives, no matter how small (hence the title). Though most of the schools' leaders reject the term "paternalistic," Whitman does seem to have a point. In defining the term "paternalistic" Whitman builds on the prior work of Lawrence Mead, who once wrote that "the problem of poverty or underachievement is not that the poor lack freedom. The real problem is that the poor are too free" (p. 36). As Whitman writes, "the paternalistic presumption, implicit in the schools portrayed here, is that the poor lack the family and community support, culutral capital, and poersonal follow-through to live according to the middle-class values that they, too, espouse." While I'm sure that many of the founders and leaders of the schools profiled would be hesitant to explicitly endorse either of these views, their schools certainly implicitly endorse at least something similar to this. Whitman makes a strong argument that these schools essentially strive to remove students from their current environments and inculcate them into a new culture -- in other words to accept the social and cultural norms of the middle or upper class and reject those that they see in the streets. Whitman is, however, hardly a dispassionate observer. He makes no attempt to mask his contempt for liberals, "multicultural activists," and unions. The book is certainly written from a particular point of view -- which should probably not come as a surprise given that it is published by a think tank that also pushes a particular point of view. It is perfectly clear that Whitman wants more charter schools and fewer unionized teachers. That said, the main topic of the book is not one that should be particularly susceptible to one's ideological beliefs. He points out that despite the fact that many conservatives have extolled the virtues of these schools that most of their founders are, in fact, unabashedly liberal. In the end, the main purpose of the schools is to raise student achievement -- not serve as guinea pigs in any ideological debates. The tales that Whitman tells of the schools paint a clear portrait of six schools that, while very different, operate quite similarly. All of the schools take a no-nonsense approach to discipline and work hard to create a positive school culture in which bad behavior is unacceptable and good behavior is rewarded. All of the schools go to great lengths to explicitly teach various social behaviors that one would expect to be second nature to middle and upper-income youth. All of the schools put great