What I Learned in School: Reflections on Race, Child Development, and School Reform
About this book
"In the world of education
reform, where silver-bullet ideas, ideologies, and intellectual fashion clamor for
influence, James Comer's thinking has long been a sea of calm, balanced, and humane
wisdom focused on the needs of the whole person. Reading Comer you see the incompleteness
of so many other approaches to reform, as well as learn an integrated approach to
making schools work. And now, here it all is in a single book. If you want to see
how schools can actually work, as opposed to affiliate with a prior belief about how
they should work, this is a must read."
—Claude Steele,professor, the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University
"The best
introduction?professional and personal—to the remarkable world of James Comer: physician-educator,
par excellence."
—Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education,
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts
"James Comer
is a rare constellation among social scientists: a great intellect, a keen analyst,
a creative problem-solver and a man of enormous empathy. His writings are required
reading for anyone interested in education reform or improving the odds for poor children."
—Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO, Harlem Children's Zone
Author Bios
James P. Comer is the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine's Child Study Center and founder of the Comer School Development Program. A prolific writer, Dr. Comer is the author of nine books and has written articles for Parents magazine as well as syndicated articles on children's health and development and race relations. In 2007, he received the Grawemeyer Award in education.


