Basic Needs: A Year With Street Kids in a City School

The greatest praise I can give this book is that as someone who is not an educator, this book is surprisingly interesting and a very enjoyable read. It works both as a critique of the school systems in this country (and their failures) and as a quasi-novel of one very compassionate woman's struggle with the difficulties of teaching in a sometimes impossible environment.

Whether Basic Needs has anything to offer you obviously depends on who you are. But whereas books like Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities will outrage some and spur them to either imagine new ways of fixing an educational system that, despite what many say is better than what we had 50 years ago, still is not enough when students start hopeful and end homeless, or to throw money at that system and hope someone will do something useful with it, Landsman's book focuses your attention differently, in ways that are simultaneously more specific and just as broad.Landsman writes about one specific group of kids during one school year, about kids who were already slipping through the cracks. The apparent lack of complete success in helping these children, coupled with incremental, inconsistent but spirit-raising breakthroughs, may leave you with needs you didn't know you had. It may remind those who have seen The Year of Living Dangerously of Linda Hunt's words to Mel Gibson, something along the lines of "You can't help everyone, you can only help those fate puts in front of you." Landsman makes you more willing to watch what's in your path, perhaps even to range further off of it to see if anyone needs help. And despite the subject matter, it warms, somehow. I wish I was still reading it.