Legal Rights, Local Wrongs: When Community Control Collides with Educational Equity (Restructuring School Change) - Softcover

Welner, Kevin G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791451283 ISBN 13: 9780791451281

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2001

Synopsis

Shows how education reforms take place within cauldrons of political interests and conflicting values and beliefs.

Based on an examination of four school districts facing the prospect of court-ordered detracking, Legal Rights, Local Wrongs challenges fundamental assumptions about the opportunities for equity-minded educational reform. Welner studied districts across the country in San Jose, California; Wilmington, Delaware; Woodland Hills, Pennsylvania; and Rockford, Illinois. These case studies show how white upper middle class parents exercised a disproportionate amount of power in local school policy making, and how that power was wielded to hinder reform opportunities intended to benefit low-income students of color. He shows how many school reforms must arise and develop within cauldrons of political interests and conflicting values and beliefs. This reform context is very different from the politically neutral environments presupposed by conventional school change literature. The book's political and normative focus accordingly examines the least often addressed-and yet most daunting-obstacles standing between America and the just, equitable schools portrayed in American rhetoric.

About this title

About the Author

Kevin G. Welner is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a former practicing attorney.

From the Back Cover

Based on an examination of four school districts facing the prospect of court-ordered detracking, Legal Rights, Local Wrongs challenges fundamental assumptions about the opportunities for equity-minded educational reform. Welner studies districts across the country in San Jose, California; Wilmington, Delaware; Woodland Hills, Pennsylvania; and Rockford, Illinois. These case studies show how white upper middle class parents exercised a disproportionate amount of power in local school policy making, and how that power was wielded to hinder reform opportunities intended to benefit low-income students of color. He shows how many school reforms must arise and develop within cauldrons of political interests and conflicting values and beliefs. This reform context is very different from the politically neutral environments presupposed by conventional school change literature. The book's political and normative focus accordingly examines the least often addressed-and yet most daunting-obstacles standing between America and the just, equitable schools portrayed in American rhetoric.

Reviews

In her landmark study, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (1985), Jeannie Oakes examined how a presumably meritocratic educational reform ("ability grouping") could have significant detrimental effects on the children of marginalized social groups in the United States. The idea of meritocracy as the foundation of the U.S. school system, recently challenged by Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, is dealt another blow by this most recent work. Welner (Univ. of Colorado), a longtime collaborator with Oakes, presents the results of his case studies of four school districts that underwent (or were threatened with) court-ordered "detracking" and discusses the "political and normative forces" that worked to promote or hinder this "equity-minded reform" at the grass-roots level. By examining the tensions that court-mandated reforms can raise among students, teachers, administrators, and parents, Welner reveals a significant wrinkle in the way educational reform is (or is not) implemented in districts and schools. Recommended for academic collections. Scott Walter, Washington State Univ., Pullman
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791451283
• ISBN 13: 9780791451281
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 333