The Garden Path: The Miseducation of a City Review

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(More customer reviews)The Garden Path: The Mis-education of a City by Andre Perry is a must read for anyone interested in exploring the true purpose and meaning of education. Set in New Orleans Louisiana, the story introduces us to a cast of characters that share critical commonalities as well as stark and drastic differences. A professor, new to the job and new to New Orleans but still determined to plant seeds of optimistic change in the school system; a cluster of students with lots of potential, lots of problems, and difficult lives; and a backdrop of political players, community members, teachers, and an infamous and powerful storm. These characters bring to the story different backgrounds and divergent perspectives. However, they all literally share common ground. Their stories illustrate how difficult and yet important it is to create a new vision for education.
The book tackles school reform, but its story is bigger than school reform. This novel speaks to the value of innovation in education. The book tackles the challenging realities of living and learning in post-Katrina New Orleans, but the story's relevance expands beyond the New Orleans state lines. This is a story about change. And changing the educational experiences of both students and teachers is a national issue. This is a story about the burdensome task of leading an effort to transform organizations, minds, and lives. It shines a spotlight on the physical, emotional, and psychological toll that the school system exerts on everyone involved in it. But ultimately, this is a story about wholeness. Perry paints a full and vibrant portrait of the educational experience--both within and outside of schools; both including and moving beyond educators and administrators; and both involving and challenging institutionally based knowledge. It is a story about education as a practice of freedom and the ways in which students, parents, teachers, and administrators all fight to experience the authentic beauty of this vital human right.
As a creative work, the book is a compelling piece of historical fiction. Its narrative lens offers rich characters and deep emotion as well as fresh and interesting writing. But the true gem of Perry's literary offering is the way in which he seamlessly weaves in the real, street-level experiences of educational reform. Based on his extensive career helping to rebuild the educational infrastructure of New Orleans, he includes the real opinions, obstacles, arguments, failures, triumphs, hopes and expectations faced by education reformists from all walks of life. The Garden Path: The Mis-education of a City is the true story of those that dared to get into the ring and wrestle with the educational process on a wet and slippery foundation.

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Idealistic professor Dr. Isaac Boyd quickly ascends to the forefront of the post-Katrina charter school movement, which unsympathetically takes control of failing schools from the hands of local community leaders. Tensions rise as out-of-town reformers and local community members compete for resources and authority. While adult battles reach a fever pitch, high school students Loren Wise and Katura Price set their own paths to improve schooling for New Orleans.

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