Book Club Final Post

For this weeks book club, we finally finished reading all the chapters within the book. It was a long and hard book to read. If you as a person are to use to the idea of looking at research articles constantly and familiar with the terminology, it was a very hard read. The book its itself was a very big research project from the author. It's I had to pick a type of research I would say its Qualitative with a mix of meta-analysis with all the effort put into this book I can imagine if needed it could be much more. The biggest theme of the whole book was finding out what was wrong with the schools throughout Chicago and what exactly was needed to fix them. The book took a primary focus on the support the school was getting which ultimately led to its downfall. It tells us in the ends that parent involvement was the key it was one of the factors schools couldn't account for and whether the parents decided to help the child or not played a huge role. The parents pushed for kids to go to school and do homework and often it was found that push was not there. Kids were being raised in a single parent home and often did not see their parents at all. When speaking to the other book club members we all discussed how important a parent can be when it comes to school. Almost all of my groupmates grew up with strict parents and agreed that without them who knows where they might have ended up. Although the book talked about a tremendous amount of issues found in the public school system. As a group, we all agreed on with the conclusion that parents are the key and downfall to the school. Without enough parental support, the institution's foundations cannot function. 

The group also discussed the quality of the book where a lot of us found that the book repeated itself a lot throughout its entirety. It gets to a point where information was so repetitive that you stop listening and gets almost boring. While the serves a good purpose and research as a group we do not recommend this book for a undergrad class. I feel that this book would serve better at a higher graduate level course.