Final Test

The Battle for Adequacy in America’s Schools

Peter Schrag

paperback

$17.95 / £12.99

Final Test describes a powerful new movement that has emerged across America in recent years to bridge the wide gap still separating the achievement of African American and Latino students from their white and Asian counterparts more than half a century after Brown v. Board. In the past fifteen years, scholars, judges, and advocates for poor children have begun to develop a progressive approach to education in which public policies and funding are based on calculations of “adequacy”—what it actually takes in teachers, books, facilities, and other resources to educate each child.

While Schrag explains the legal and legislative battles for reform with great insight and clarity, he also never loses sight of the human side of the story, “describing in poignant detail the impact of funding inequities on individual students and why ‘money matters’ in rectifying educational inadequacies” (Advocacy Center for Children’s Educational Success with Standards). As the California Journal raved, “few writers can translate complex ideas into compelling nonfiction like Peter Schrag.”

Peter Schrag served for nineteen years as editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. He has written about schools for over forty years and his articles have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy, and many other publications. The author of Paradise Lost (The New Press), a New York Times Notable Book, he lives in Oakland, California.