Abstract
After reviewing competing explanations for the disproportionate rates of school failure experienced by poor and nonwhite populations advanced in recent decades, the author, a former urban alternative high school teacher, advances what he calls a culture-centered interactionist framework. This framework blames neither the impoverishment of students nor the ethnocentricity of middle-class educators alone for educational disadvantagement, but rather locates the problem in a more complex interaction between nonmainstream students and mainstream schools. Many poor children arrive at school well behind their more fortunate peers academically, but chronic school-based inequities such as low teacher expectations and unexamined ability-grouping practices clearly exacerbate these differences. The minority view that racial differences in academic performance are hereditary in nature is also addressed and critiqued.
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