Soar: How Boys Learn, Succeed, and Develop Character

A respected educator, who has advised Hillary Clinton and Cory Booker on scholastic issues, presents a plan for teaching the country’s most educationally endangered group—boys.

David Banks knows a few things about at-risk boys. In 2004, he petitioned New York City’s mayor to allow an all-boys public school to open in one of the most troubled districts in the country, the South Bronx. He had a point to prove: When rituals that boys are innately drawn to are combined with college prep-level instruction and community mentorship, even the most challenging students can succeed. The result? The Eagle Academy for Young Men—the first all-boys public high school in New York City in more than thirty years—has flourished and has been successfully replicated in other boroughs and other states.

In Soar,Banks shares the experiences of individual kids from the Eagle Academy as well as his own personal story to help others get similar results. He shares the specific approach he and his team use to drive students, from tapping into their natural competitiveness and peer-sensitivity, to providing rituals that mimic their instinctual need for hierarchy and fraternal camaraderie, to finding teachers who know firsthand the obstacles these students face.

Result-oriented and clear-eyed about the challenges and the promises of educating boys at risk, Soar is a book that no one who wants to see our young men flourish—from parents and educators to teachers and employers—can afford to miss.