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In this provocative volume, the authors argue that public education is a central part of American civil religion and, thus, gives us an unquestioning faith in the capacity of education to solve all of our social, economic, and political problems. The book traces the development of America's faith in public education from before the Civil War up to the present, exploring recent educational developments such as the No Child Left Behind legislation. The authors discuss how this faith in education often makes it difficult for Americans to think realistically about the capacities and limitations of public schooling. Bringing together history, politics, religion, sociology, and educational theory, this in-depth examination: (1) Raises fundamental questions about what education can accomplish for the citizens of the United States; (2) Points out that many supposedly opposing viewpoints on public education actually arise from the same root assumptions; (3) Exposes the gaps between our pursuit of equity in schools and what we really accomplish with students; and (4) Looks at ways in which education can be organized to serve a diverse population.

This book traces the long legal history of first racial segregation, and then racial desegregation in America. The authors explain how rapidly changing demographics and family structure in the United States have greatly complicated the project of top-down government efforts to achieve an "ideal" racial balance in schools. It describes how social capital--a positive outcome of social interaction between and among parents, children, and teachers--creates strong bonds that lead to high academic achievement. The authors show how coercive desegregation weakens bonds and hurts not only students and schools, but also entire communities. Examples from all parts of the United States show how parents undermined desegregation plans by seeking better educational alternatives for their children rather than supporting the public schools to which their children were assigned. Most important, this book offers an alternative, more realistic viewpoint on class, race, and education in America. This book contains the following eight chapters: (1) School Desegregation: A Policy in Crisis; (2) How Did We Get Here?; (3) The Demographic Transformation of America; (4) It Takes "A Certain Kind" of Village to Raise a Child; (5) The Political Economy of Educational Opportunity; (6) Rational Self-Interest vs. Irrational Government Policy; (7) School Desegregation and the Racial Achievement Gap; and (8) A New Perspective of Race and Schooling: Attaining the Dream.

This book uses extensive interviews and statistical data to examine the failed desegregation efforts in Louisiana as a case study to illustrate how desegregation has followed the same unsuccessful pattern across the United States. It shows that the practical difficulty with desegregation is that academic environments are created by all the students in a school from the backgrounds that all the students bring with them. However, the disadvantages that minority children have to overcome affect schools more than schools can help remedy these disadvantages. After an introduction, "The Problem of Writing about Race," eight chapters discuss: (1) "Louisiana's Schools Prior to Desegregation: The Roots of a Racially Divided Society"; (2) "The Struggle to Desegregate the Schools: Overcoming Injustice through the Schools"; (3) "New Orleans: The Beginning and the End of a Process"; (4) "East Baton Rouge: School Desegregation and Unintended Consequences"; (5) "School Desegregation and White Flight in Lafayette Parish"; (6) "Louisiana and the Dilemma of Desegregation"; (7) "The Academic Consequences of Desegregation and Resegregation: Revisiting the Harm and Benefit Thesis"; and (8) "Recommendations" (policy recommendations in the areas of neighborhood schools, magnet schools, majority-to-minority programs, residential desegregation, economic development for minority communities, and reconstruction of family). Two appendices present single-parent families and the educational environment and a statistical examination of the harm and benefit thesis. (Contains 280 endnotes.) (SM)

This book tells the story of America's single largest group of refugee children, the children of Vietnamese refugees, as they have experienced growing up in the United States. Although a significant minority of these children lags behind, for the most part Vietnamese children's school success suggests that ethnic progress depends on more than the human and financial capital with which the immigrant parents begin. The book relies mainly on a case study of Versailles Village, a low-income urban minority community in New Orleans (Louisiana), the second-largest Vietnamese community outside California. Surveys in 1993 (n=198) and 1994 (n=404) focused on Vietnamese high school students in this community. Chapter 1, "The Scatterings of War," traces the historical progress of Vietnamese resettlement. Chapter 2, "Resettlement," describes the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the Vietnamese population in the United States. Chapter 3, "The Reconstruction of the Ethnic Community and the Refugee Family," shows the ethnic community and the family as sources of social capital, and chapter 4, "Networks of Social Relations: Support and Control," describes patterns of social and kinship relations in the Vietnamese social system. Chapter 5, "Language and Adaptation," considers the issue of parental native language. Chapter 6, "Experiences in Adaptation to American Schools," explores school adaptation among Vietnamese students. Bicultural conflict and the issues of gender role changes and ethnic identification encountered by young Vietnamese are discussed in chapter 7, "Straddling the Gap: Bicultural Conflicts and Gender Role Changes." Chapter 8, "Delinquency: Insiders and Outsiders," describes specific patterns of peer group association among Vietnamese children and examines how they may be affected by differential associations with peers. Chapter 9, "Conclusion: Contexts of Reception, Selective Americanization, and the Implications for the New Second Generation," summarizes the main findings of the study and discusses the implications of these findings for other groups. (Contains 13 figures, 42 tables, and 209 references.) (SLD)