With over 70,000 copies of the first edition in print, this radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers’ bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years in New York City’s public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine. This second edition describes the wide-spread impact of the book and Gatto’s "guerrilla teaching." John Gatto has been a teacher for 30 years and is a recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award. His other titles include A Different Kind of Teacher (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001) and The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2000).

This volume reports on the Case Study Project, an initiative that evaluates the experiences of math and science teachers across the United States and includes levels of schooling and achievement levels. The report focuses on typical public schools in the United States at three levels: elementary, junior high, and senior high with the intent of creating a composite profile of typical schools. The volume is divided into five chapters: "Rationale for the Study,""The Development and Implementation of Education Standards in the United States,""Individual Differences and the United States Education System,""The Role of School in United States Adolescents' Lives," and "Teachers and the Teaching Profession in the United States." Results show that the typical school had adopted curriculum standards or guidelines proposed by state departments of education, rather than by a national body. One exception to this was the influential set of national guidelines developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Despite the general interest in standards, the choices made by parents, teachers, and students reflected many values, of which the desire for independence was one of the strongest. Students who were surveyed exhibited high optimism, especially those students from middle- class families. (RJM)