Passed On : Public School Children in Failing American Schools

Passed On presents an honest, often gritty story of the classroom experience in failing schools in Philadelphia, PA, a city with violent crime and a high poverty rate. Through stories of her own students, Louise Marr reveals how the current corporate reform movement misunderstands what teachers and students need to increase achievement levels. Louise Marr outlines the real problems in the schools today, which are fundamentally rooted in the poverty and violence students face on a daily basis, and demonstrates how we are losing precious time by following the misguided solutions proposed by education reformers and policy leaders today.

Since the passing of No Child Left Behind in 2001, American schools have emphasized test scores to measure school performance. Even as teachers have fought to get rid of this detrimental trend, today the new corporate reformers, and even our own government leaders, support high-stakes testing to evaluate teachers. They also promote the privatization of our public schools by turning them into charter and online schools, bringing big profits to many corporations and blatantly ignoring the problems of poverty and underfunding in our public schools.

Sadly, many corporate reformers turn a blind eye to the real problems that teachers face today: trying to teach in classrooms that are filled with an overwhelmingly high number of pregnant teens, children who cannot read beyond the third grade, and children who attend violent neighborhood schools that are dangerously underfunded and underprepared to deal with their daily heartaches.

Passed On gives us an honest portrayal of what teachers and students are up against in poor, failing American schools today, and provides a much-needed front-line perspective in the current school reform debates.