The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem

By Patrick McCloskey and Patrick J. McCloskey

Book Overview

The Street Stops Here offers a deeply personal and compelling account of a Catholic high school in central Harlem, where mostly disadvantaged (and often non-Catholic) African American males graduate... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520255178
• ISBN13: 9780520255173
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.8" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

A Principal's Struggle to Guide Black Youth

I taught at Rice High School in 2003, right after Gober left, so I never met the guy. There were rumors about why he left, but nobody would say, except that he "had some conflict with the Brothers." Rice High School is a good school. The students are on time and sober, there is clear penalty for misbehavior, and with that kind of foundation, it's easier to teach the kids. It's an all-boys school, which eliminates the need to "look cool". With no girls around to impress, there's less opportunity to lose face. Gober was a tough Principal, but also a good one. A lot of these boys didn't have fathers, so he was probably the only man who they could really trust. The author explains the students' mentality toward the teachers; West Indian teachers were used to absolute authority, and had difficulty with the rowdy boys. Black American teachers soured quickly, because the boys wouldn't take orders from someone who was "from the streets." But the White teachers did okay; Back youth were used to White authority figures. Still there were more complicated problems. The Dean, a large Arab-American from Michigan, resented a lot of the teachers. He felt he was doing their job for them; after all, why should he have to deal with a disruptive boy? Why shouldn't the teacher be controlling the class? I can really relate to this because I ran a suspension site and had to deal with kids who the other teachers couldn't handle. Gober was vocal about the problems these boys faced. He made no secret of his Afro-Centric attitude, and he wanted this school to have a clear emphasis on educating Black youth. He had a tough job, because Black men were not looked upon positively by these boys. It was the Black men, not the white men, that broke promises, walked out on them, neglected them, etc. I was at Rice High School for only a short time. Most of the teachers mentioned in the book had left before I arrived, and I was one of six new ones. Olivine Brown was now acting as principal until a replacement was found, and though she was a decent person, she took the kids' side too often. Every time there was a discipline problem, she'd remind me "remember, you are teaching students of color" and "you have to remember that there is a lot of anger left over from slavery." This woman wasn't bad, but she was nuts! Sometimes Gober was the only one out there trying to be the "man" in the boys' lives. When you have a school full of angry fatherless kids, you have worse problems than paper airplanes and lost homework.

Great Book

This book makes excellent use of the narrative form to investigate and chronicle the successes and failures of inner-city education in New York City. While the themes concern neutral, generally applicable principles, the writer uses a gripping story to bring these principles to life. I strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in either education or New York City. We must reform our school systems in order to compete in the global marketplace and this book can add much to the debates to come!

Very insightful on education and problems in the inner-city

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of education, Catholicism, and New York. Lots of good insight into contemporary problems of education in the inner city.

Present Day Civil Rights

This book offers a suspenseful investigation into the dynamics at work behind various inner-city social and educational problems. The non-fiction narrative takes place over one school year at a Catholic high school in Harlem, run by a talented yet troubling principal who dedicates the school to awakening a sense of personal accountability in the minds of his often-lackluster students. The book dispells many myths often accepted as sufficient explanation for why Catholic schools have better outcomes with their students than public schools, such as that they get to work with a more promising body of students. Overall, the story of the complicated principal and his troubled students is itself compelling enough to read through the book quickly, but reading through the book also thoroughly informs and changes the perspective of its reader.

Education for Educators

'The Street Stops Here' is McCloskey's fascinating journalistic account of his year at Rice Catholic High School in Harlem. As a piece of academic writing, it is generous and accessible. The casual reader, looking for a good romp, will find an engrossing narrative about the teachers and students of Rice, a story that stands on its own as novelistic entertainment; the serious-minded reader, looking for a serious-minded book, will find an acute analysis of urban education and a sobering digest of the challenges faced by New York's private high schools. It is McCloskey's fine, intelligent writing that renders the book enjoyable as both exposé and essay. Calling it 'required reading' makes it sound like a chore; but just as 'The Street' should be read by anyone interested in American education, it should also be taught in college classrooms: if not simply for McCloskey's impressive handling of the subject matter, then for the book's brave insistence that we re-examine some of the flimsy axioms of lower education that have hitherto been taken for granted.