We are told daily, it seems, that our students don't measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or their peers in other countries. But over the past four years, Mike Rose has been visiting classrooms across the country - from blue-collar Los Angeles to Mexican-American border towns; from the south side of Chicago to rural Montana; from Mississippi and Kentucky to Baltimore and New York City - and has been struck again and again by their intellectual and social richness and by what they suggest about the current state of education. Rose's previous book, Lives on the Boundary, was an award-winning investigation of the way America views its large numbers of adults and children who have been labeled remedial, underprepared, or illiterate. In Possible Lives Rose provides a provocative opportunity to revitalize our hopes for public education by taking us into classrooms. He watches teachers work and listens as students reason through problems. With compassion, insight, and