The Chester County Book & Music Company

*Back to School*
	The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator’s Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child, by Ron Clark (Hyperion, $19.95, 1401300014) If there were a code you could learn that would lead you to become a great teacher – of students, of your children, or of any young person in your life – wouldn’t you want to learn it? The Essential 55 is a collection of the amazingly effective rules that Ron Clark used to become an extraordinary teacher. Through trial and error, this teacher has distilled fifty-five ideas that have helped him take apathetic students in some of the country's most challenging areas and transform them into award-winning scholars. Covering all aspects of life, from the classroom to the world, from human interactions to the most frightening of all – cafeteria and bathroom manners – Ron Clark shows that with determination, discipline, and regular rewards, the children you stick by will be the children you eventually admire.
	Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School, by Elizabeth Gold (Tarcher/Penguin, $24.95, 1585422444) In response to plummeting test scores and a soaring drop-out rate, in April 1992, the New York City Board of Education established several New Visions schools, including the School of the New Millennium in Queens, New York. Created with hope and high ideals, New Millennium was to be a place where teachers and students would treat each other like family members, where no child would be lost or left behind. This is the story of how that idealism failed. Elizabeth Gold came to work at New Millennium as a mid-year replacement for a teacher who had suffered a nervous breakdown. Over the course of four months, her classroom nearly defeated her too. "Our goal was not simply to graduate students but to transform them into loving, compassionate Leaders of Tomorrow," she writes. "Though I never figured out how to do it, I did suspect that cowering behind my desk was not the way." In Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity, Gold describes the challenges she and her colleagues faced: no books, a principal not grounded in reality, and a system in which every child-but not every teacher-has a voice. She chronicles her students and how she tried to reach them: disruptive Cindy Fernandez, with a voice that was "part bullhorn and part plaintive baby"; beautiful Sarah Patel, a victim of her classmates' jealousy; and Peter Garcia, a skateboard-loving, Hobbit-reading teenager with an adult-sized sense of honor and self-respect. At a time when the struggles of the School of the New Millennium are reflected in textbooks and schools across the country, this modern-day Up the Down Staircase offers provocative, wildly entertaining insight into what students should learn and what schools should actually be for.
	College Rankings Exposed: The Art of Getting a Quality Education in the 21st Century, by Paul Boyer (Peterson’s $24.95, 0768913608) College rankings appear like clockwork each fall, letting us know who's "#1." But rankings create a false impression that the college experience can be reduced to a single number, encouraging students to scramble up a nonexistent ladder. Colleges Rankings Exposed helps students find the right "fit" for them. Instead of numbers, the book provides a true picture of what college can offer in terms of a student's own interests, aspirations, and strengths. Nationally recognized higher education consultant Paul Boyer advises students, parents, and educators on what to look for in a high-quality college education and how to take control of the college admissions process.
	The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College, by Jacques Steinberg (Penguin, $15.00, 0142003085) In the fall of 1999, New York Times education reporter Jacques Steinberg was given an unprecedented opportunity to observe the admissions process at prestigious Wesleyan University. Over the course of nearly a year, Steinberg accompanied admissions officer Ralph Figueroa on a tour to assess and recruit the most promising students in the country. The Gatekeepers follows a diverse group of prospective students as they compete for places in the nation's most elite colleges. The first book to reveal the college admission process in such behind-the-scenes detail, The Gatekeepers will be required reading for every parent of a high school-age child and for every student facing the arduous and anxious task of applying to college.
	School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School, by Edward Humes (Harcourt, $25.00, 0151007039) What does a top public school look like? In the case of Whitney High, it's a ramshackle campus in an unfashionable part of L.A., where the budgets are tight and the student body resembles a mini United Nations. Despite its appearance, families move across town – and across the world – hoping to enroll their children. Whitney High delivers everything parents want from a public school: love of learning, a sense of mission, and SAT scores that pave the way to elite universities. But attending a dream high school carries a toll: high-achieving, high-pressured kids survive on espresso and four hours' sleep and fall into despair if they get a B. Forget Generation X. This is Generation Stressed. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes spent a year immersed in this remarkable world, where our best and brightest students struggle to harmonize ambitious parents' dreams with their own goals, and teachers search for an elusive balance between creating great test-takers and fostering great learners.