The World We Created at Hamilton High

“[A] graceful, human, engaging narrative of what happened to an American high school during the successive decades of optimism, integration, student upstarting and declining results. [It] has heart and mind… Here is a survey course in what went wrong when everybody but teachers claimed to know best… A superb case history of what is probably the noblest American dream—education for everybody.”—Art Seidenbaum, The Los Angeles Times

“If a reading list was compiled of the 10 best books on American high schools, one of the 10 would certainly be Gerald Grant’s The World We Created at Hamilton High. Mr. Grant spent years studying one high school in order to study the changes that have taken place in American secondary education since the 1950s. His detailed and thorough research produced a lasting and important work.”—Martin Morse Wooster, The Washington Times

“The World We Created at Hamilton High is beautifully written, carefully researched, and continually insightful. With searing honesty Gerald Grant portrays the dilemmas of the schools today, especially those conditions that cause public schools to retreat behind a façade of bureaucratic legalism and to abandon the attempt to forge a sense of community. By looking closely and sensitively at one school, Grant places the policy debates and history of the past thirty-five years under his microscope. He has succeeded in writing a brilliant and provocative book.”—Diane Ravitch

“[Grant’s] historical portrait of Hamilton—scrupulously researched and keenly analyzed—makes this book an invaluable resource in a field characterized by its ahistorical perspective and its ongoing love affair with ‘the new.’”—Rosetta Cohen, Teachers College Record

“Grant is an excellent historian and writer. His book contains, in addition to a good story, a powerful argument for school reform.”—Philip A. Cusick, American Journal of Education

“Grant’s reconstruction of the experiences of the people at Hamilton High and his remarkable attempt to bring those experiences to life make for compelling reading.”—Pamela B. Joseph, American School Board Journal

“Gerald Grant provides a meticulous study of Hamilton High School (a pseudonym) from its opening in the 1950s to the present… For those of us who experienced those years, Grant’s account is a vivid and painfully accurate chronicle of a tumultuous time in American education. For those of us who didn’t, his book offers special insights into the forces that have—for better or worse—shaped our public high schools.”—Frank L. Tout, Educational Leadership

“Gerald Grant has written the benchmark book of the 1980s… The World We Created at Hamilton High has an authenticity and a respect for the complexity of life in schools that has rarely been equaled in our professional literature.”—Kevin Ryan, Phi Delta Kappan