Our Schools Suck Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education

Our Schools Suck is a passionate, hard-hitting critique of a re-emerging hurtful and offensive discourse on the alleged & culture of failure among youth of color. Rather than demonizing children, we need to take aim at the role that schools play in the creation and maintenance of social hierarchies. This multi-voiced account is a soulful, if poignant, re-framing of what really is an urgent, national crisis to which we must all attend. - Angela Valenzuela,author of Subtractive Schooling and Leaving Children Behind Our Schools Suck offers a clear and unmitigated analysis of the perspectives and voices of students who are trapped in schools that fail at meeting their intellectual and social needs. - Pedro A. Noguera,co-editor of Unfinished Business: Closing the Racial Achievement Gap in Our Schools This book reminds us that there are lives and futures at stake and that young people are passionate and tenacious, despite the obstacles they face every day in our urban schools. - Nadine Dolby,author of Constructing Race: Youth, Identity, and Popular Culture in South Africa Our Schools Suck aims to give voice to some of the youth caught up in the maelstrom of 21st century urban education, within a critical framework of the cultural values and larger socioeconomic forces that shape the decade. (City Limits) For anyone desperate for a fresh look into the apartheid education system, in which Black and Latino students are currently trapped. (The Daily Voice)