DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Finding a Measure of Trust

Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement
By Anthony S. Bryk and Barbara Schneider. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. 217 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

I cannot overemphasize how important the topic of this book is, not only to issues of school change, transformation, or improvement but also to the day-to-day life of students, teachers, administrators, parents, school boards, and researchers interested in articulating the life of schools. This said, however, I cannot pretend to be objective regarding trust in schools, nor can I pretend that it is simply a topic of scholarly interest. For the past 15 years I have been intimately involved in the life of many elementary schools, as a parent (years ago), as a practicum supervisor of student-teachers, as someone involved in professional development, as a graduate supervisor of teachers whose classrooms I have visited, and, most pervasively, as a hermeneutic researcher interested in the great abundances of meaning and power and inheritance that constitute the everyday life of the classroom.