BOOK/MEDIA REVIEWS

Abstract

Why Race and Culture Matters in Schools: Closing the Achievement Gap in America's Classrooms, by Tyrone C. Howard. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010, 181 pp., $27.65, paperback.In Why Race and Culture Matters in Schools: Closing the Achievement Gap in America's Classrooms, Tyrone C. Howard, Associate Professor of Education of Urban Schooling and Director of Center X in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA, discusses the gaps in the academic achievement of low-income minority students in American schools. Howard provides an informative and insightful discussion of how culture and race continues to play a powerful role in influencing teaching and learning outcomes of students of color. This book is timely and stimulates the ongoing conversation and recent debates in K-12 regarding appropriately measuring student learning outcomes and closing the achievement gap among different socioeconomic groups of students. He organizes the book by exposing and describing the problem of the achievement gap in light of critical race theory (CRT) and sociocultural theory, and he finalizes his book by examining four different exemplary schools that moved from a cultural deficit paradigm to a cultural difference paradigm using culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP). Howard's goal in writing this text is to convey the urgency to educators, researchers, administrators, and parents to have a deep and critical understanding of race and culture to better inform school reform designs and to help close the achievement gaps.Howard begins with an overview that succinctly introduces his goals in writing the book. In the introduction he explains his use of both conceptual and empirical scholarly research. Because Howard wants to move away from the White-Black dichotomy, he explains how his findings are situated in both a multicultural theory and practice as well as by tenets of two theoretical frameworks-critical race and sociocultural theory (p. 2). Howard's first two chapters examine the teaching implications of the changing demographics in schools. He candidly explains how school performance data demonstrate the academic achievement gap between students of different socioeconomic groups. Howard defines the achievement gap as thediscrepancy in educational outcomes between various student groups, namely, African American, Native American, certain Asian American (i.e., Filipino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, Samoan, Thai, and other Southeast Asian students), and Latino students on the low end of the performance scale, and primarily White and various Asian American students at the higher end of the academic performance scale, (p. 10)Howard's documented portrayal and analysis of the U.S. schools' traditional measures of achievement-reading, math, retention, suspensions, expulsions, and graduation rates-illustrate the pronounced academic discrepancies not only among groups of different socioeconomic statuses but also of different races. According to Howard, the large influx of Latino and Asian populations in the United States has dramatically changed the demographic landscape, which raises the question: Are educators prepared to teach in diverse schools? (p. 40). After examining the racial make-up of the current teaching population, Howard concludes that there is a scarcity of teachers of color, which can have potential negative repercussions in the quality of instruction for students of color. Therefore, adopting a multicultural education as a conceptual and guiding framework can help teachers understand the necessary skills to teach diverse learners, and more importantly, recognize the important roles that race, culture, language, gender, and class currently play in United States' classrooms and society (p. 45). Using a multicultural approach in the classrooms, according to Howard, is a promising path to guarantee educational parity for all students.In the subsequent chapters, (chapters 3,4, and 5) Howard describes the ways in which culture and race impact teaching, learning, and student achievement. …