What I Learned In School: Reflections on Race, Child Development, and School Reform

"In the world of education reform, where silver-bullet ideas, ideologies, and intellectual fashion clamor for influence, James Comer's thinking has long been a sea of calm, balanced, and humane wisdom focused on the needs of the whole person. Reading Comer you see the incompleteness of so many other approaches to reform, as well as learn an integrated approach to making schools work. And now, here it all is in a single book. If you want to see how schools can actually work, as opposed to affiliate with a prior belief about how they should work, this is a must read."
—Claude Steele,professor, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University

"The best introduction?professional and personal—to the remarkable world of James Comer: physician-educator, par excellence."
—Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts

"James Comer is a rare constellation among social scientists: a great intellect, a keen analyst, a creative problem-solver and a man of enormous empathy. His writings are required reading for anyone interested in education reform or improving the odds for poor children."
—Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO, Harlem Children's Zone

What I Learned in School

James P. Comer began his extraordinary life's journey from his hometown of East Chicago, Indiana. While his childhood friends languished in jail or faced early deaths from alcoholism, Comer went on to become a medical doctor, child psychiatrist, acclaimed leader of education reform, and expert on race relations.

What I Learned in School highlights, in one volume,?the major contributions of world-renowned scholar Dr. James P. Comer, whosevisionary work has dramatically shaped the fields of school reform,?child development, psychology, and race. This small collection of Dr. Comer's work is beautifully arranged and includes an introduction and engaging updates from the author. These works paint a remarkable picture of what we've all learned so far, and what we all must learn going forward.'The excerpts presented in this collection span Dr. Comer'sremarkable career and include selections from his best-selling book? Maggie's American Dream to the influential. Leave No Child Behind.

At the very heart of the lessons learned is the idea that the most efficient and effective way to meet the needs of our students would be to prepare our education workforce to integrate student development and academic learning in all aspects of learning from school entry through student maturity. Dr. Comer puts the focus on promoting student personal responsibility in preparation for meeting life tasks.

As this book clearly reveals, James Comer's life and work has been an endless quest to answer one persistent question: Why not prepare a workforce to support the development of the whole child?

What I Learned in School is a volume in the series Outstanding Ideas in Education.

James P. Comer is the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine's Child Study Center and founder of the Comer School Development Program. A prolific writer, Dr. Comer is the author of nine books and has written articles for Parents magazine as well as syndicated articles on children's health and development and race relations. In 2007, he received the Grawemeyer Award in education.