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This essay examines four books that may offer some insight into the post–No Child Left Behind (NCLB) discussion about educational policy, reform, and performance. Collectively The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling, by Jal Mehta, Too Many Children Left Behind: The US Achievement Gap in Comparative Perspective, by Bruce Bradbury, Miles Corak, Jane Waldfogel, and Elizabeth Washbrook, Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools, by Amanda E. Lewis and John B. Diamond, and Toxic Schools: High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam, by Bowen Paulle, show that concerns with school accountability are now embedded in broader discussions about the importance of investing in children, families, and schools and how the internal dynamics of schools either support or frustrate those investments. We hope that these works represent a trend toward less ahistorical and reductionist and more empirically grounded t...

In this essay, Charles Payne and Tim Knowles argue that given President Obama's support of charter schools, it is time for educators and policymakers to closely consider both the possibilities and the limitations of these schools in the context of urban school reform. The authors discuss the unique flexibility of charter schools—namely in staffing,time, budgetary autonomy, governance, and protection from district policies—as a significant source of their potential effectiveness. However, they also note the major challenges these schools face, as evidenced by variability in achievement results, sustainability,and quality of instruction. The authors suggest that these strengths and challenges must be considered together, and that the administration must focus on the elements of effective schooling for all children. Drawing upon this kind of evidence,the authors conclude, will lead to a more grounded and less partisan debate about urban education.

Although the term “multicultural education” was first used in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the context and goals for its development have been evolving throughout the world for centuries. The impetus for multicultural education has been and continues to be human rights and liberation. This paper will present how past human struggles have been funneled into multicultural education. In addition, it will offer an explanation for why it was inevitable that the term “multicultural education” would first appear in the United States. This paper also will focus on the development of multicultural education since the 1960s, and finally, it will present a theoretical perspective and framework for viewing the development of multicultural education. Multicultural education ought to be considered the latest embodiment of human liberation.

The events, both legal and illegal, that have led to the miseducation of American groups, particularly minorities of visible distinction, have been many and span centuries. Some of these occurrences were carried out in conjunction with a doctrine that had as its basis a premise of racial superiority. Consequently, our schools of today, whether by design or due to a lack of awareness on the part of many educators, are a product of this doctrine of racial superiority. The purpose of this paper is to review how racism, expressed through attitudes and court decisions, has come to demand the antidote of multicultural education, and to offer suggestions as to how multicultural education can be invaluable in

Ella Jo Baker died in 1986. Her entire adult life was devoted to building organizations that worked for social change by encouraging individual growth and individual empowerment. Nonetheless, even among those generally knowledgeable about the modern history of the Afro-American struggle, neither her name nor her sense of how we make change are widely known. She worked during a time when few Americans were capable of taking a Black woman seriously as a political figure. Yet, Ella Baker was a central figure in Afro-American activism as an organizer and as an advocate of developing the extraordinary potential of ordinary people. Few activists can claim a depth and breadth of political experience comparable to Ella Baker's half-century of struggle. She was associated with whatever organization in the Black community was on the cutting edge of the era-the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in the forties, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the fifties, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the sixties. Miss Baker's activism-and she was always pointedly Miss Baker to the people she worked with, a mark of respect'-was

(1981). The Civil Rights Movement as History. Equity & Excellence in Education: Vol. 19, No. 3-6, pp. 54-60.