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Navigate Books of the Month:
Intro The
Shape of the River The
Teenage Liberation Handbook Failure
to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds On
the Outside Looking In: A Year in an Inner-City High School
The
Word on the Street: Fact and Fable About American English Previous Books of
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Class Dismissed On the Outside Looking
In: A Year The closest neighbor to tragedy is irony, as Cristina Rathbone proves in On the Outside Looking In: A Year in an Inner-City High School. The book chronicles the lives of disenfranchised high-school students caught in an educational Catch-22: They go to school in order to better themselves in a system that deems them undeserving of a decent education. Rathbone is a thirtysomething journalist of British and Cuban descent who spent a year observing the goings-on at New York City's West Side High School, an under-funded alternative school in the heart of the city's Garment District. The students at West Side had been transferred out of other city schools for various reasons--drug abuse, incarceration, truancy--and farmed out to West Side, which had itself been displaced and relegated to three floors of a 12-story office building. City officials considered the school a place for hopeless cases, and as such it was treated as an academic Cinderella and given no amenities, such as a gym, a hot-lunch cafeteria or a music department. "Largely composed of students that even the worst zoned schools rejected," Rathbone writes, "West Side was far closer to the bottom of the heap and seemed almost as marginalized and neglected as the kids it served." The book follows the lives of several students, all of whom are members of principal Ed Reynolds' "Family Group," an extended homeroom run in the style of a therapy group. During Family Group, kids share the often shocking and tragic stories of their day-to-day existence as nonchalantly as suburban teens might talk about the highlights of a homecoming game. There is Rasheem, a talented artist who is too poor to afford a winter coat and who lives in various homeless shelters; Manny, who is his own father's heroin dealer; and Julie, who comes to school drunk one morning because the night before her predatory stepfather, an ex-con for whom she's helped plan a welcome-home party, has raped her for the umpteenth time. Reynolds is determined to save his students from the chaotic legacy of their parents and from a system that has marginalized them to the point of forgetting them almost completely. He struggles against odds such as massive budget cuts, the resistance of parents and the often erratic and self-destructive behavior of the students themselves. A 20-year veteran at West Side, Reynolds is that rare breed of person who is invulnerable and seasoned without being cynical. He is a true believer in the possibility, however slim, that badly broken lives can be mended. Despite its tragic elements, On the Outside Looking In is a well-crafted page turner that will leave you both heartbroken and inspired. Human-interest stories make up the meat of the book, but interspersed with them are passages depicting the budgetary carnage of the post-Cuomo era. Here Rathbone reveals a Dickensian world in which Governor Pataki and Mayor Giuliani no more know what's good for education than a crack-addicted mother or a physically abusive father can sense what's good for a child. It's unfortunate--anyone can see that--and Rathbone, an astute writer, does not spend time preaching. Instead, she focuses our attention on detailed and enormously compelling stories of teenagers wrestling with the idea of faith in themselves. At the end of this extraordinary book you will not feel so much drained as anxious, wondering about the fates of these young people. --Francesca French
originally published September 30, 1998
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