Restoring Opportunity: The Crisis of Inequality and the Challenge for American Education Author: Greg J. Duncan Richard J. Murnane | Language: English | ISBN:
1612506356 | Format: PDF
Restoring Opportunity: The Crisis of Inequality and the Challenge for American Education Description
In this landmark volume, Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane lay out a meticulously researched case showing how in a time of spiraling inequality strategically targeted interventions and supports can help schools significantly improve the life chances of low-income children.
The authors offer a brilliant synthesis of recent research on inequality and its effects on families, children, and schools. They describe the interplay of social and economic factors that has made it increasingly hard for schools to counteract the effects of inequality and that has created a widening wedge between low- and high-income students.
Restoring Opportunity provides detailed portraits of proven initiatives that are transforming the lives of low-income children from prekindergarten through high school. All of these programs are research-tested and have demonstrated sustained effectiveness over time and at significant scale. Together, they offer a powerful vision of what good instruction in effective schools can look like. The authors conclude by outlining the elements of a new agenda for education reform.
Restoring Opportunity is a crowning contribution from these two leading economists in the field of education and a passionate call to action on behalf of the young people on whom our nation's future depends.
Copublished with the Russell Sage Foundation.
- Library Binding: 200 pages
- Publisher: Harvard Education Press (January 14, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1612506356
- ISBN-13: 978-1612506357
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Duncan and Murnane are professors of education at U.C. Irvine and Harvard respectively. We have a crisis in education, one hard to address sensibly in a politicized climate of well-meaning but inflexible advocacy. In clear and simple exposition, the authors point out that our schools today no longer facilitate the "American Dream" of upward mobility. Instead, children of low-income families are more likely to face economic hardships while children of high-income families have structural advantages which secure them the jobs of the future. Education was once the great leveler, but no more. The term the authors use for this fork in the road is "divergent destinies," a phrase congenial to a feudal society and deadly to a democratic one. We read regularly about income disparity in America, as wealth of "Gilded Age" or Roman patrician proportions accumulates in the accounts of the super-rich. Now we learn that the poor are closed out from rising to the middle. How long before the curse of class consciousness and class conflict become American political forces? Not long unless we address the problems this book outlines and the prescriptions it offers.
Just as its analysis of the problem is neither judgmental nor hysterical, but calmly reasoned, the solutions it offers are a blend of the best of all solutions tried. Take accountability. This book does avoids the polemics of the battlefield of "accountability." It argues for "sensible accountability." Accountability alone, as in exit tests which keep the poor from graduating, without the assistance needed to master the material one is held accountable for (and the teachers, and the schools, and the state, and the country) is destructive and not "sensible.
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