A Class by Themselves tells a complicated story, but one that embraces the complexities and contradictions. Ellis is creative in including neighborhoods, teachers, students, and parents in a narrative that might easily have stayed at the levels of theory and policy. In the concluding chapter, Ellis points to the ways that this history set the stage for further developments and present-day concerns in education, connections that will already be apparent to many readers by the end of his book. -- Penny L. Richards * H Net Reviews * Elliss work is not only empirically solid but also original, creative, and synthetic. His prose style is clear, his analytic structure solid, and his conclusions safely controlled (when he speculates, he says so). All these qualities put A Class by Themselves? in, well, a class by itself. -- Adam R. Nelson, University of Wisconsin-Madison * em>The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth *
