Achieving Educational Equality: Assuring All Students an Equal Opportunity in School

Abstract

Achieving Educational Equality: Assuring All Students an Equal Opportunity in School, by Herbert Grossman. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1998. 217 pp. $48.95, cloth. A product of the New York City public school system, Herbert Grossman began his career a classroom teacher. He eventually founded and directed an alternative school for students with learning and behavioral problems. He has taught, lectured, and consulted at numerous universities, and has directed a preparatory program for multicultural and bilingual education teachers. He is a prolific writer who has authored nine books about education, and an adept storyteller whose simple, straightforward writing style makes for an easy and enjoyable read. His stories make vivid the breadth of his experience as an educator. In this ambitious and provocative work, Grossman is an advocate for children. He describes the impediments to equal educational opportunity that plague the children of immigrants and minorities as well as children who are poor, gay, lesbian, and female. He asserts that sexism and homophobia-as well as the racial, class, and cultural biases that plague societies around the world-preclude these students from attaining an adequate education. In Achieving Educational Equality, Grossman provides a global perspective of the ways in which governments engender educational inequities. Although he comments on some foreign school systems, his primary focus is on the United States. This latest work offers several solutions to the educational problems that certain American schoolchildren face. Most of the book's discussion provides a politically charged account of a still-separate and still-unequal U.S. school system. Grossman explains that most poor and many minority students attend schools that receive inadequate financial support from federal, state, and local governments. Further, these schools lack essential equipment, materials, and adequately prepared teachers. To address these inequities, Grossman suggests various changes in governmental spending and school financing. He also argues in favor of hiring policies that would yield a better prepared and more racially and culturally diverse body of teachers. He observes that many of the inequities that poor and minority children face could be ameliorated by efforts to more actively enforce existing legislation prohibiting discrimination based on race, gender, and national origin. Grossman also describes how certain racist, sexist, homophobic, class-conscious, and xenophobic conduct on the part of many educators and administrators results in the discriminatory evaluation, classification, and extreme castigation of certain students. Further, he depicts the biases and conflict evident among student groups and the prejudicial thinking of some students with regard to their teachers. One of his suggestions for mitigating discrimination in the school setting is the elimination of biased materials and curricular approaches; another is the initiation of a serious discourse about racism in the schools. Additionally, Grossman suggests that schools counteract sexist attitudes by hiring more women to teach traditionally male-dominated subjects such as science and mathematics and advancing more women to the ranks of principal and school superintendent. In this book, Grossman writes as an advocate for students from different cultures, pupils from rural areas, homeless children, the children of migrant workers, and children who do not speak English. More often than not, these children attend schools that do not adequately consider the special circumstances that impede their attainment of an adequate education. He offers several suggestions for accommodating their needs. In the book's last section, Grossman explores the inadequacies of university-based teacher preparation programs that produce teachers who are often unprepared or unmotivated to deal with diverse student bodies, and offers suggestions for improving these programs. …