Full Description
Demonstrates how ingrained ideas of race created and sustain the achievement gap in U.S. schools.
The racial achievement gap in U.S. education is a pervasive and consistent problem, an unavoidable fact of public schooling in this country. Because This Is Not for Us is a multi-site critical race ethnography of policy and institutional relationships in an large urban West Coast school district, focused on the practices that created and sustain the achievement gap in that district's schools. In this daring and provocative work, author Sabina Elena Vaught examines how this gap, and the policies and practices that sustain it, is produced and reproduced by structures of racism and race attitudes operative in education. She interweaves numerous interviews with and observations of teachers, principals, students, school board members, community leaders, and others to describe the complex arrangement of racial power in schooling, and concludes that the institutional relationships that create and support policy practices ensure the continued undereducation of Black and Brown youth.
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Color of Money: Student Funding and the Commodifi cation of Black Children
2. The Jeremiad: Decentralization and the Deregulation of Democracy
3. Martin Luther King, Jr. High School: Hate Speech and the Grammar of White Supremacy
4.Conclusion: Speaking Truth to Power, Acting Truth to Power
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
