Urban Schools, Public Will:
Making Education Work for All Children
By Norm Fruchter
Teachers College Press (2007)

Khet: Strategy at the Speed of Light
Innovation Toys, LLC, New Orleans
www.khet.com

For almost 50 years Norm Fruchter has been a gentle, compassionate, and consistent warrior in the service of creating justice, equity, and quality in the public schools. In the late 1960s, he helped found Independence High School in Newark, N.J., one of a handful of new small progressive high schools based on school-based control of pedagogy, serving students from poor families, and community organizing as a strategy to develop support for democratic education.

Arguably, some of these schools provided models for what has recently become a small schools movement. Certainly, some of the individuals involved, including Fruchter, are still active in school reform.

Over the years Fruchter has been a community school board member in Brooklyn, a funder at the Aaron Diamond Foundation (where he was instrumental in the development of the New Visions Schools in the New York City public schools), director of the Center for Education and Social Change at New York University, and, now, Director of the Community Involvement Program of the Annen-berg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. I can't think of anyone more qualified, experienced, committed, and articulate writing about the recent history of school reform. His new book, Urban Schools, Public Will: Making Education Work for All Children, deserves a careful reading by all people committed to public school systems that can succeed.