Dismantling Educational Inequality

This long-awaited, solution-oriented book helps readers understand how inequality is organized in our public educational system. A four-component developmental model provides a policy-oriented framework that takes into account how children are socialized in and out of schools. Given an educational system that produces unequal opportunities for student learning, closing the gap requires thinking out of a box and the current conglomeration of social and economic policies. A multi-level strategy that aims for all to be educated at grade-level through a coordinated national strategy is presented to eliminate educational inequality. This is a «must read», controversial book that offers educators and policy-makers a fundamental understanding of how the achievement gap can be eliminated at the population level.

Over the past decade, No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top, data mining initiatives, Title IX gender equity, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, and executive actions on immigration illustrate key federal initiatives that have redefined standards, priorities, and practices within educational institutions. Similarly, state policies in terms of school funding, school choice, teacher qualifications, student bullying, and other measures have added another layer of complexity to the education law and policy dialogue particularly when addressing matters of education inequality. These emergent policies beget the question: how have these policies contributed to easing the effects of educational inequality? The purpose of this book is to examine the role of law as potentially countering or impeding desirable education reforms, and it calls on readers to consider how policymakers, lawyers, social scientists, and educators might best alter the course in an effort to advance a more just and less unequal educational system.

This book promotes collaborative ways of knowing and group accountability in learning processes to counteract the damaging effects of neoliberal individualism prevalent in educational systems today. These neoliberalist hierarchies imposed through traditional, autocratic knowledge systems have driven much of the United States’ educational policies and reforms, including STEM, high stakes testing, individual-based accountability, hierarchical grading systems, and ability grouping tracks. The net effect of such policies and reforms is an education system that perpetuates social inequalities linked with race, class, gender, and sexuality. Instead, the author suggests that accountability pushes past individualism in education by highlighting democratic methods to produce a collective good as opposed to a narrow personal success. In this democratic model, participants contribute to the common goal of elevating the entire group. Drawing from a well of creative praxes, reflexivity, and spiritual engagement, contributors incorporate collective dreaming to envision alternate realities of learning and schooling and summon the spirit into action for change.

This book promotes collaborative ways of knowing and group accountability in learning processes to counteract the damaging effects of neoliberal individualism prevalent in educational systems today. These neoliberalist hierarchies imposed through traditional, autocratic knowledge systems have driven much of the United States' educational policies and reforms, including STEM, high stakes testing, individual-based accountability, hierarchical grading systems, and ability grouping tracks. The net effect of such policies and reforms is an education system that perpetuates social inequalities linked with race, class, gender, and sexuality. Instead, the author suggests that accountability pushes past individualism in education by highlighting democratic methods to produce a collective good as opposed to a narrow personal success. In this democratic model, participants contribute to the common goal of elevating the entire group. Drawing from a well of creative praxes, reflexivity, and spiritual engagement, contributors incorporate collective dreaming to envision alternate realities of learning and schooling and summon the spirit into action for change.

Examines major myths informing American education and explores how educators can better serve students, increase college retention rates, and develop alternatives to college that don’t disadvantage students on the basis of race or income Each year, as the founding headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy (BAA), an urban high school that boasts a 94 percent college acceptance rate, Linda Nathan made a promise to the incoming freshmen: “All of you will graduate from high school and go on to college or a career.” After fourteen years at the helm, Nathan stepped down and took stock of her alumni: of those who went to college, a third dropped out. Feeling like she failed to fulfill her promise, Nathan reflected on ideas she and others have perpetuated about education: that college is for all, that hard work and determination are enough to get you through, that America is a land of equality. In When Grit Isn’t Enough, Nathan investigates five assumptions that inform our ideas about education today, revealing how these beliefs mask systemic inequity. Seeing a rift between these false promises and the lived experiences of her students, she argues that it is time for educators to face these uncomfortable issues head-on and explores how educators can better serve all students, increase college retention rates, and develop alternatives to college that don’t disadvantage students on the basis of race or income. Drawing on the voices of BAA alumni whose stories provide a window through which to view urban education today, When Grit Isn’t Enough helps imagine greater purposes for schooling.

Schooling for Critical Consciousness addresses how schools can help Black and Latinx youth resist the negative effects of racial injustice and challenge its root causes. Scott Seider and Daren Graves draw on a four-year longitudinal study examining how five different mission-driven urban high schools foster critical consciousness among their students. The book presents vivid portraits of the schools as they implement various programs and practices, and traces the impact of these approaches on the students themselves. The authors make a unique contribution to the existing scholarship on critical consciousness and culturally responsive teaching by comparing the roles of different schooling models in fostering various dimensions of critical consciousness and identifying specific programming and practices that contributed to this work. Through their research with more than 300 hundred students of color, Seider and Graves aim to help educators strengthen their capacity to support young people in learning to analyze, navigate, and challenge racial injustice. Schooling for Critical Consciousness provides school leaders and educators with specific programming and practices they can incorporate into their own school contexts to support the critical consciousness development of the youth they serve.

The issues surrounding the academic under-performance of the government secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago, compared with the denominational assisted schools have been debated for many years. An equally persistent issue surrounds the placement in the secondary schools and the inequalities which many persons perceive to be inherent in the process. In this masterly study, Professor Ramesh Deosaran examines the nature and dimensions of inequality in opportunities for education, and their relationship to gender, race, family background and socio-economic status. He effectively demonstrates that unequal opportunity and unequal outcomes are embedded in the country's education system - a legacy from the colonial past that institutionalized a system of schools run by the government and those run by religious denominations but supported by the state. Deosaran points to the 1960 Concordat which enshrined the rights of these denominational assisted schools and argues the case for revisiting the status quo to debate whether to revise, scrap or enshrine the Concordat in the constitution. Deosaran argues that the structural inequity in the education system and its outcomes amount to discrimination against the most disadvantaged groups with serious debilitating implications for the country's social and economic progress and its status as a modern democracy. He calls for a removal of the masks of inequality and discrimination and appeals for sustained, carefully planned and data-driven reforms in Trinidad and Tobago's education system. The study is multi-disciplinary in nature drawing from various disciplines, including politics of education, the sociology of education, the economics of education and educational psychology, backed up by data from his own research and from a variety of reports dating back to the 1960s.

The last half century has seen a dramatic expansion in access to primary, secondary, and higher education in many nations around the world. Educational expansion is desirable for a country's economy, beneficial for educated individuals themselves, and is also a strategy for greater social harmony. But has greater access to education reduced or exacerbated social inequality? Who are the winners and the losers in the scramble for educational advantage? In Growing Gaps, Paul Attewell and Katherine S. Newman bring together an impressive group of scholars to closely examine the relationship between inequality and education. The relationship is not straightforward and sometimes paradoxical. Across both post-industrial societies and the high-growth economies of the developing world, education has become the central path for upward mobility even as it maintains and exacerbates existing inequalities. In many countries there has been a staggering growth of private education as demand for opportunity has outpaced supply, but the families who must fund this human capital accumulation are burdened with more and more debt. Privatizing education leads to intensified inequality, as students from families with resources enjoy the benefits of these new institutions while poorer students face intense competition for entry to under-resourced public universities and schools. The ever-increasing supply of qualified, young workers face class- or race-based inequalities when they attempt to translate their credentials into suitable jobs. Covering almost every continent, Growing Gaps provides an overarching and essential examination of the worldwide race for educational advantage and will serve as a lasting achievement towards understanding the root causes of inequality.