A strong argument for educational reform at every level in order to make schooling truly equitable.
A vigorous argument against the entrenchment of elite interests in the nation’s higher-education system.
Colleges and universities are supposed to serve as levelers of the playing field, giving members of ethnic and economic minorities a chance at success. As it is, write Georgetown University scholars Carnevale and Strohl and education journalist Schmidt, the elite, “using selective colleges as gatekeepers,” has taken deliberate steps to limit access to power and wealth to its own members. “Instead of being havens of diversity,” they observe, “where Americans of all walks of life can learn from one another, many of our colleges and universities have become isolated communities, where students and faculty largely interact with those who are like them.” Although higher education is broadly accessible, it has also become highly stratified, with top-tier schools increasingly out of reach for students of limited means. Even when minority students do get into places such as Yale, the authors note, the dropout rate tends to be higher than that of white students because of a lack of support in the form of counselors, faculty advisers, and faculty who themselves are minority members. While the graduation rate at elite schools is 82%, it is only 49% at two- and four-year schools with large minority populations. (The minority graduation rate for black and Latino students at elite schools is 81%.) The authors attribute the country-club quality of elite schools in part to academic tracking that is growing ever stronger within K-12 schools, by means of which “low-income and racial-minority children have the odds stacked against them even before they enter kindergarten.” Against all this, they propose a number of correctives, including class-based affirmative action, noting that family-need measures are broadly popular even as ethnically based programs are not.
A strong argument for educational reform at every level in order to make schooling truly equitable.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62097-486-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.
A former NFL player casts his gimlet eye on American race relations.
In his first book, Acho, an analyst for Fox Sports who grew up in Dallas as the son of Nigerian immigrants, addresses White readers who have sent him questions about Black history and culture. “My childhood,” he writes, “was one big study abroad in white culture—followed by studying abroad in black culture during college and then during my years in the NFL, which I spent on teams with 80-90 percent black players, each of whom had his own experience of being a person of color in America. Now, I’m fluent in both cultures: black and white.” While the author avoids condescending to readers who already acknowledge their White privilege or understand why it’s unacceptable to use the N-word, he’s also attuned to the sensitive nature of the topic. As such, he has created “a place where questions you may have been afraid to ask get answered.” Acho has a deft touch and a historian’s knack for marshaling facts. He packs a lot into his concise narrative, from an incisive historical breakdown of American racial unrest and violence to the ways of cultural appropriation: Your friend respecting and appreciating Black arts and culture? OK. Kim Kardashian showing off her braids and attributing her sense of style to Bo Derek? Not so much. Within larger chapters, the text, which originated with the author’s online video series with the same title, is neatly organized under helpful headings: “Let’s rewind,” “Let’s get uncomfortable,” “Talk it, walk it.” Acho can be funny, but that’s not his goal—nor is he pedaling gotcha zingers or pleas for headlines. The author delivers exactly what he promises in the title, tackling difficult topics with the depth of an engaged cultural thinker and the style of an experienced wordsmith. Throughout, Acho is a friendly guide, seeking to sow understanding even if it means risking just a little discord.
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-80046-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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