New & Noteworthy: Healing, Reinventing, Coming Together

As writer-educator Mike Rose lamented in a recent issue of The Nation , cynicism overshadows much of today's discourse on education. In the Classroom: Dispatches from an Inner-City School That Works provides a path out of this negativity. It does so not by echoing pleas for bigger budgets and progressive curricula, but by advocating an "unswerving adherence to the basics of education." As the book by Yale University law student Mark Gerson testifies, inner-city schools, often surrounded by violence and economic decay, can act as the proverbially calm center of the raging storm.

In the Classroom is based on the author's firsthand experience teaching 10th grade U.S. history in an urban parochial school. Just a 20-minute drive from the affluent suburb where Mr. Gerson grew up, St. Luke High School is situated in an impoverished section of Jersey City, N.J. The author is frank about his decision to defer entrance to Yale Law School and, at the age of 22, enter this "whole other world." "I wanted to learn all I could about this other place," he writes, "and perhaps help some kids as well."

What he discovered at the inner-city Roman Catholic school were many of the components found in all successful schools, including parental involvement and close ties between students and teachers. Mr. Gerson applauds the strong sense of discipline present at St. Luke--discipline that he learned could be instilled in either of two ways: by...