Unprepared Students

The thesis of this study is that the success of Rose's book rests not on the factual analysis of his subject, but instead on his personal involvement with the students, an involvement which to an important degree is based on his own experience as an "underprepared" student.

If any change is to be brought about with respect to the educational opportunities of such students, it is necessary first that the nation's people become not only aware of such students but that they empathize emotionally with them. We are in an era of conservative fiscal policy in which every disadvantaged group must compete for dwindling public and private funding. Without some sort of profound identification with the subjects of any study such as Rose's, the meaningful, practical impact will be minor if anything at all. Rose is able to lead the reader into a state of empathy with these students because Rose

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vere decline from that high plateau. In fact, our educational system has failed a certain number of students from the beginning. The problem in the past, says Rose, is that these students---the underprepared, the students who have the capacity to learn but who are labeled and terrorized out of learning---have been effectively written off by the educational system. This is especially true in an era where funding for education is diminishing. In such an era, the underprepared will be the first group to be pushed further out of the educational loop, simply because they are viewed as uneducable. Rose's book and, in fact, his entire career, is based on the belief---substantiated by his own success and twenty years of success in educating these "uneducables"---that the underprepared can in fact be educated. Not only can these students be educated, but their children, who would otherwise have been also considered underprepared, are also made more educable by having their parents move up the ladder of education: Much, much later I found out that some of the children of the people we taught . . . had gone on to careers in education themselves: they're now teachers in the schools in those East Los Angeles communities. . . . I can't help b
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2638
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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