Less than Equal: A Former Urban Schoolteacher Examines the Causes of Educational Disadvantagement

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.