Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children

Michael Rutter is a psychiatrist who is a sociologist. It's a rare combination. This particular book is widely cited in the resiiency literature, yet few have read it outside of graduate courses. I knew of the basics of it as a national researcher studying how schools can prevent violence. It wasn't until a few months ago I actually read the book. I wish I had much earlier. Some folks will squawk about the book being written in 1979. It's really timeless. There are powerful lessons to understand in this book. The book sorts out the effects of schools on four domains: achievement, attendance, behavior and delinquency. Each of those domains is studied in the context of inner-city London. Through precision measurement of virtually every aspect of the school environment, Rutter and his colleagues bring us to an understanding of how the smallest of things in a school setting have a large impact, such as the number of student jobs in a building or the amount of student work hung on the walls. The book is shy on describing why these processes work in the way I would like, and I think it's important to turn to the work of people like G.Roy Mayer or Beth Sulzer-Azaroff (Lasting Change)to get a careful understanding of why the processes work. In the age when people are concerned about children shooting others in schools, I think this book is a fundamental book to understand what we must do.