Sociology

No school district can be all charismatic leaders and super-teachers. It can't start from scratch, and it can't fire all its teachers and principals when students do poorly. Great charter schools can only serve a tiny minority of students. Whether we like it or not, most of our youngsters will continue to be educated in mainstream public schools. The good news, this book reveals, is that there is a sensible way to rebuild public education and close the achievement gap for all students. Indeed, this is precisely what's happening in a most unlikely place: Union City, New Jersey, a poor, crowded Latino community just across the Hudson from Manhattan. The school district—once one of the worst in the state—has ignored trendy reforms in favor of proven game-changers like quality early education, a word-soaked curriculum, and hands-on help for teachers. When beneficial new strategies have emerged, like using sophisticated data-crunching to generate pinpoint assessments to help individual students, they have been folded into the mix. The results demand that we take notice—from third grade through high school, Union City scores on the high-stakes state tests approximate the statewide average. In other words, these inner-city kids are achieving just as much as their suburban cousins in reading, writing, and math. What's even more impressive, nearly ninety percent of high school students are earning their diplomas and sixty percent of them are going to college. Top students are winning national science awards and full rides at Ivy League universities. These schools are not just good places for poor kids. They are good places for kids, period.

An all-too-popular explanation for why black students aren't doing better in school is their own use of the “acting white” slur to ridicule fellow blacks for taking advanced classes, doing schoolwork, and striving to earn high grades. Carefully reconsidering how and why black students have come to equate school success with whiteness, this book argues that when students understand race to be connected with achievement, it is a powerful lesson conveyed by schools, not their peers. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic research, the book shows how equating school success with “acting white” arose in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education through the practice of curriculum tracking, which separates students for instruction, ostensibly by ability and prior achievement. Only in very specific circumstances, when black students are drastically underrepresented in advanced and gifted classes, do anxieties about “the burden of acting white” emerge. Racialized tracking continues to define the typical American secondary school, but it goes unremarked, except by the young people who experience its costs and consequences daily. The narratives in this book throw light on the complex relationships underlying school behaviors and convincingly demonstrate that the problem lies not with students, but instead with how America organizes its schools.

How can we help African American and Latino students perform better in the classroom and on exams? Why are so many African American and Latino students performing less well than their Asian and White peers? Researchers have argued that African American and Latino students who rebel against “acting white” doom themselves to lower levels of scholastic, economic, and social achievement. However, this book argues that what is needed is a broader recognition of the unique cultural styles and practices that non-white students bring to the classroom. Based on extensive interviews and surveys of students in New York, the book demonstrates that the most successful negotiators of the American school systems are the multicultural navigators, culturally savvy teens who draw from multiple traditions, whether it be knowledge of hip hop or of classical music, to achieve their high ambitions. The book refutes the common wisdom about teenage behavior and racial difference, and shows how intercultural communication, rather than assimilation, can help close the black-white gap.

This book reconstructs the subjective interpretation of school life as perceived by teachers and pupils at Rishi Valley School (in Andhra Pradesh, India) which is often considered the hallmark of progressive education. It argues that the individual is significant to the schooling process in terms of the worlds that are created, managed, negotiated, contested, and developed. It also contends that the school's ‘ideology’, in the case of Rishi Valley, is especially explicit in underlining how the individual catalyses the transformation of the social world. The book explores the dilemmas and contradictions in the functioning of the transcendental and local orders in the everyday life of the school, and cites the fact that the students and teachers learn to negotiate their way through these contradictions and the conflict they may generate. It also considers the significant relations between philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti's ideas and the institutions that seek to implement them. The Rishi Valley School is one such institution in India, with a dynamic character which is reflected in its ability to engage in a continuous process of transformation. The book also discusses ideology and education, school organization, school culture (rituals and ceremonies), teacher culture, formal and informal interaction between teachers, pupil culture, and freedom and constraint in teacher-pupil interaction.

This book examines English studies in the school curriculum in India and, using this as a lens, explores the shifts in the construction of nationalism, modernity, and identity in independent India. Discussing the national education policy in general and the English language policy in particular, it traces the development of a specific ideology of postcoloniality in India. It examines State-produced school textbooks, identifies how English curriculum both reflects and constructs identity in particular ways, and discusses classroom practice in schools to consider the ways in which ideology shapes pedagogic practice.

This book details a sociological, comparative analysis of the institutional and group dynamics in eight schools located within four cities in the United States and South Africa. This book details how even as discussions and approaches to educational equality differ significantly in two nations rebounding from centuries of overt practices of racial and social inequality, many everyday school exchanges and practices parallel one another. Educators in the United States and South Africa are faced with the continual challenges of how to make schools work better for all students and of how to incorporate diverse groups of students better within these schools. This book argues chiefly that schools in these two societies, weakened historically by racial and ethnic discrimination, will greatly miss the benefits of a critical social policy for reducing inequality via education if they do not pay sufficient attention to the school's socio-cultural context. This book sheds insight into how to enable school-communities to better incorporate previously disadvantaged groups and to engender equity by promoting “cultural flexibility.” It also raises important and timely questions about the social, political, and philosophical purposes of schooling that have been greatly ignored by many and cautions against myopic approaches to education that merely focus on test-scores and attainment outcomes.