There is widespread agreement that we need dramatic changes in ways we do business in American schools. However, there is also enormous disagreement about how we got to where we are today, what changes we actually need, and what role multicultural education has played in process. From some points of view, pressing concern is how to educate all children well, particularly how to teach children of color, children who are poor, and children from diverse groups, who have been disproportionately underserved by educational system. In Geneva Gay's (2000) recent book Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice, for example, chapter on power pedagogy begins with these lines: Teaching is a contextual and situational process. As such, it is most effective when ecological factors ... are included in its implementation. This basic fact is often ignored ... especially if [students] are poor. Instead, they are taught from middle class, Eurocentric frameworks that shape school practices. This attitude of blindness stems from several sources. One of these is notion that education has nothing to do with cultures and heritages.... [Another is that] education is an effective doorway of assimilation into mainstream society for people from diverse [groups].... These students need to forget about being different and learn to adapt to U.S. society. (p. 21) Throughout her book, Gay argues that simply spotlighting achievement gap or blaming families or backgrounds of failing groups has not gotten us very far. She also asserts that acknowledging long history of racism and cultural hegemony--although true--will not solve problem. Instead, she argues for new paradigms of competent instructional action, such as culturally responsive teaching. Gay makes it clear, however, that even this is not sufficient. Rather, she points out that teachers must have the moral courage and will to stay course in efforts to make educational enterprise more multiculturally responsive, even in face of opposition that is surely to come from (p. 210). Of course we do not have to look far to locate opposition to viewpoints such as Gay's, nor do we have to search to identify somewhere from which that opposition comes. Sandra Stotsky's (1999) book on multiculturalism provides a very different read on changes we need in schools. In direct counterpoint to Gay's (2000) book, Stotsky's book argues that multicultural education is a problem for American schools: Most of recent changes in content of [elementary school instructional reading materials] and in teaching methods outlined in them have been introduced as part of an approach to curriculum development called multiculturalism.... Multiculturalism was proposed as only approach that could broaden horizons of American school children and inculcate respect for racial and ethnic minority groups.... [Most] were willing to accept advice of scholars and teacher educators who advocated a multicultural approach.... Some did so out of desperation for what was promised as a pedagogical magic bullet, others ... believed such changes were necessary for social equality. (p. 7) Stotsky's pinpointing of multicultural education as a problem is clear in full title of her book: Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Has Undermined Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason. Here Stotsky suggests that more subtle agenda of multiculturalism is anti-White, anti-capitalistic, and anti-intellectual. Linking multiculturalism to progressive education and whole language, Stotsky warns, The fusion of anti-intellectualism of multiculturalists and anti-teaching philosophy of whole language advocates is an educationally deadly combination in elementary grades (p. …