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The True Story of a Principal, a Teacher, a Coach, a Bunch of Kids and a Year in the Crosshairs of Education Reform
by Michael Brick
Being principal was never her dream. Anabel Garza, the young widow of a young cop, got by teaching English to immigrant children, taking college classes at night and raising her son.
And Reagan High was no dream assignment. Once famous for its state football championships, educational achievements and award-winning design, the school was a shadow of its former self. "Identified for improvement," said the federal government. "Academically unacceptable," said the state. Promising students were fleeing. Test scores were plunging. The education commissioner set a deadline of one year, threatening to close the school for good.
But when Anabel took the job - cruising the mall for dropouts, tailoring lessons to the tests, firing a few lazy teachers and supporting the rest - she started something no one expected. As the numbers rose, she set out to re-create the high school she remembered, with plays and dances, yearbooks and clubs, crowded bleachers and teachers who brought books alive.
And soon she was not alone. There was Derrick Davis, a star player on the basketball team in the early 1990s, coaching the Raiders toward a chance at the playoffs. There was Candice Kaiser, a science teacher who had left hard partying behind for Christ, drilling her students on chemistry while she drove them to games, tutoring sessions, Bible studies and sometimes even doctors' appointments. There were JaQuarius Daniels, Ashley Brown and 900 other kids trying to pass the exams, escape the streets and restore the pride of a neighborhood, all while still growing up.
Across the country, public schools face the threat of extinction in the numerically ordained churn of the accountability movement. Now, for the first time, we can tally the human cost of rankings and scores. In this powerful rejoinder to the prevailing winds of American education policy, Michael Brick takes us inside the high-pressure world of a school on the brink. Compelling, character-driven narrative journalism, Saving the School pays overdue tribute to the great American high school, and to the people inside.
"Despite the project's high stakes, Brick's reliance on trite quotation and magazine-style storytelling may interfere with the book's ability to reach a wide audience." - Publishers Weekly
"Inspiring reading." - Library Journal
"This non-didactic journalist's record of one school's journey through the confounding stakes of recent reform makes for instructive reading." - Kirkus Reviews
"Through the compelling tale of Reagan High's spitfire principal, Anabel Garza, Michael Brick humanizes the policy debates over education and renders an empathetic and generous dry-point of teachers and students struggling to succeed against the odds. Saving the School is a poignant and moving read about the real toll of education reform on those charged with shaping our children's futures." - Warren St. John, author of Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team and One Woman's Quest to Make a Difference
"At once an inspiring portrait of a Texas principal’s fight to reform her school and an indictment of the American education system." - O, The Oprah Magazine
"The book is a triumph, genuinely gripping and emotionally powerful." - The Boston Globe
"A compelling, enlightening account of a school community rising to save itself in the unforgiving, data-driven, often nonsensical world bequeathed to public education." - The Washington Post
"Michael Brick details the down-to-the-wire efforts to keep Austin’s once great Reagan High School afloat." - Parade Magazine, Parade Picks selection
This information about Saving the School was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael Brick, a former New York Times reporter and sportswriter, has written feature stories from Alaska to Brooklyn to Mexico, including contributions for the Pulitzer Prize-winning project Portraits of Grief. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Stacy, and their children. Inspired by Anabel Garza and the teachers at Reagan High, they've started a scholarship fund for students at the school. Information is available at www.savingtheschool.com.
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