Taught by America: a Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton
Review by Kristen Manger
Taught by America: a Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton
by Sarah Sentilles
Beacon Press
$23.95
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Thirty-six first-grade students pouring into a classroom with only thirty desks and a handful of pencils. A schoolyard with a ball-less tetherball pole, decrepit basketball hoops, and treacherous shards of glass. Graffiti on the mural of the American flag—inflicted by a parent of a student. With admirable courage and honest self-doubt, Sarah Sentilles enters this world of the Compton Unified School District. Armed only with her admittedly naïve optimism and unflinching spiritual faith, Sentilles fights to level the academic playing field for her first- and second-grade students in a neighborhood notorious for its poverty and feared for its violence.
“When our old ways of understanding the world do not work anymore, what do we do?” In her recently published book, Taught by America: a Story of Hope and Struggle in Compton, author Sarah Sentilles not only challenges Americans to consider this question, but also to act upon it. Turning from her privileged upbringing in Connecticut and undergraduate studies at Yale, Sentilles travels to Compton, California, for a two-year Teach for America program, whose mission is to promote educational equality for impoverished students across the country. After a six-week crash course in teaching, recent college graduates dive into full-time teaching jobs in America’s poorest school districts. Some find the experience too overwhelming and choose to return to the comforts of their own economic stratum. Others, like Sentilles, use these emotionally exhausting years to fuel their own campaigns for much-needed social and educational change.
Through a compilation of vivid character sketches, Sentilles presents us with a cross-section of Compton residents and students. From the only white student, lice-ridden Loretta Mavely, continually tormenting Sentilles, to the impeccably-groomed and prodigious Eleana Dominguez reading on an eighth grade level, yet having to do so on her bottom bunk shared with four family members in a garage converted to a duplex, Sentilles painfully details seemingly hopeless situations while bolstering her argument that love and ambition can prevail in even the most desperate conditions.
Taught by America succeeds not only as a call to action, but also as a fabulously honest account of a young adult attempting to elicit change in a world where such efforts are often met with strong cyncism. Admitting that originally TFA was something she felt she should do rather than something she wanted to do, Sentilles’s two years result in an emotional and spiritual awakening that every individual effort does count, and that we as Americans need to look to our own country’s problems before setting off to cure the rest of the world.
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