Books: Excerpts

'I Touch Your Future, I Vote'

Thomas French, an award-winning journalist for the St. Petersburg Times, spent a year with the students and teachers of Largo High School in central Florida. His goal was to find out how today's high school experience differs from that of past generations. The result is South of Heaven: Welcome to the High School at the End of the Twentieth Century.

In addition to sympathetic portraits of five teenage students, the book gives readers a feel for the complexity of the jobs facing teachers and school administrators. In the excerpt below, the educators discover some cold realities about lobbying the state...