Stubborn Hope: Memoir of an Urban Teacher is a unique portrait of two decades of teaching in an urban high school, and an inside look at the effects of the new reforms on urban education. Sometimes humorously, sometimes painfully, the author describes the struggles and achievements of some exceptional young people. Interspersed with the portraits are lessons learned about teaching in an urban environment: class management; homework and literacy; the art, not science, of teaching. Finally, the author describes the route her school has taken over the last two decades of changing reforms. In the era of small learning communities, the huge, old school rises from chaos to success. Then, with the onset of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, it plunges into a morass as bad or worse than the situation she encountered twenty years before. What worked in the past is being replaced by a system that punishes and betrays students. It's happening across the country. The book concludes with a warning: before any more damage is done, we need to return to the values that created public education in America.