The Way It Spozed To Be Author:James Herndon "A new powerful, low-keyed document.....A very personal, moving and readable book." The New York Times Here is the sad, yet funny, record of on ill-fated year in a metropolitan ghetto school, 98 per cent Negro, 99 per cent "deprived," and 100 per cent chaotic. It tells how the educational bureaucracy, the schools, and life itself in our big citi... more »es are all rigged against the students who can't take it- the ones we call "deprevied." The Way it Spozed to Be. A report on the classroom ware behind the crisis in our schools. "The most accurate description so far in print of ghetto school-children and the forces (teachers and administrators) lined up against them." -Nat Hentoff, The New Republic Herndon's first book, The Way It Spozed To Be (1968), chronicles his first year teaching, in a poor, segregated junior high school in urban California. This book describes his despair at the inadequacy of the school system and his innovative efforts to teach his students to read, which led to his being fired at the end of the year for poor classroom management.« less