Still Failing reveals America's daunting reality of the persistent racial gap in academic achievement despite decades of judicial actions on school desegregation. Critical of top-down social engineering, the authors offer an alternative account to explain why desegregation still fails to meet its intended goal, guiding readers toward a better understanding of how race, class, and social networks influence educational ... Read moreoutcomes and help them envision a more realistic approach to equal access to educational opportunities.
Min Zhou, Tan Lark Sye Chair Professor of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University and co-author of The Asian American Achievement Paradox There are things we think we know that we in fact need to be reminded of now and then. Caldas and Bankston teach us that the way we approached America's race problems in the 1950s and 1960s doesn't apply gracefully to the 2010s, even when it comes to noble-sounding concepts such as desegregation of schools. Still Failing: The Continuing Paradox of School Desegregation points us to how we can get kids of all colors educated in an America long past the stark oppositions of the era of Brown v. the Board of Education.
John McWhorter, associate professor, Center for American Studies, Columbia University Caldas and Bankston have done an excellent job in dissecting the ongoing dilemma of school desegregation. They bring solid credentials to the job, having worked on numerous school desegregation cases and authored numerous research studies. They argue, convincingly, that the issue of race is more about economic and family inequality than racial differences, and that coercive policies to bring about racial or socioeconomic balance in schools have been counter-productive. They ask that we let schools be schools instead of laboratories for social experiments, and they endorse policies that stress individual family choices for the of type of school program that best serves their children.
David Armor, Professor Emeritus, School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs, George Mason University Show Less