Against the Current: How One School Struggled and Succeeded with At-Risk Teens.

• Author: Mayo, Michael K.

A few months ago, George Will devoted a column to praising one of my brother schools, St. Ignatius Academy in the inner city of Baltimore. If the school sounds like "a faint, quaint echo from another century," he writes, "so much the worse for ours." And who can doubt him? Loyola is small, intense, and Jesuit; it has high expectations and tells children how to meet them; it is highly successful. The sucker punch, though, is as obvious as the by-line. We don't need school boards, goes the subtext. We just need Jesuits.

While the idea intrigues me, it conveniently leaves the rest of us out of the picture. That's the problem with the flood of Triumphant Schools books out there -- accounts of embattled, heroic children get tossed up like tennis balls, which can be whacked into any ideological corner if untethered to a hard analysis of the facts. Remember that bizarre story of the black principal who kept order with his baseball bat? What weird message lurks there?

Michael Brosnan almost overcomes this slipperiness in Against the Current: How One School Struggled and Succeeded with At-Risk Teens. It is the lively, if not always lucid, tale of the Urban Collaborative Accelerated Program, a new two-year school which serves Providence's most "at-risk" children. Brosnan easily picks up the school's energy. He's honest enough to profile the average, non-angelic kids who don't seem to deserve their school; he also includes plenty of stories of kids who, finally given the chance most suburban Americans have had, sweat out their circumstances and succeed. In interviews with teachers, students, and the endlessly energetic founder and principal, Rob DeBlois, Brosnan pulls together a realistic story of a school with its head on straight. And he gives hints of how it can -- and cannot -- happen elsewhere.

"How do you get a kid to work on English when he has had a few bottles of beer before class?" asks one teacher. DeBlois's answer: Make that kid's school small. With only 105 students, the school can give the attention they demand and the sense of community they don't get at home. Teachers spend hours and hours cheerleading kids, trying to convince them why school matters. In a traditional, big, sink-or-swim high school, these kids would be sunk.

Just as important as size, DeBlois has also carved out independence from the public school board. Though publicly funded, the Urban Collaborative is run entirely by the teachers. Discipline is always a problem, but...