Education: Westside Story

An inner-city school that works

Each school day about 20 children, ages five to twelve, bound up the steps of an old brownstone in Chicago's rundown Garfield Park area. They settle quietly in a small classroom crowded with battered desks. Maps and vocabulary lists festoon the walls; books overflow the corners. At 9 o'clock sharp, the tall, no-nonsense teacher begins to stride up and down the rows. "What did Socrates say?" she questions. "The uneducated man is like a leaf blown from here to there, believing whatever he is told," chorus the children. "What did Marcus Aurelius tell us?" "He alone is...

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