A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana - Softcover

Bankston, Carl L.; Caldas, Stephen J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826513891 ISBN 13: 9780826513892

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the United States still has a long way to go to attain true integration of our educational system.

Using extensive interviews and a wealth of statistical information, Bankston and Caldas examine the failed desegregation efforts in Louisiana as a case study to show how desegregation has followed the same unsuccessful pattern across the United States. Strong supporters of the dream of integration, Bankston and Caldas show 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. Unfortunately, the disadvantages that minority children have to overcome affect schools more than schools can help remedy these disadvantages.

About this title

About the Author:

Carl L. Bankston III is an associate professor of sociology at Tulane University and co-author of the prize-winning Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States. Stephen J. Caldas has been a public school teacher and worked as the psychometrician for the Louisiana Department of Education. He has authored or co-authored numerous articles on school achievement and is currently associate professor in the department of educational foundations and leadership at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Our close study of racial composition in the schools of Louisiana has led us to conclude that desegregation has often been self-defeating precisely because activists, the courts, and others seeking laudable social change have seen the racial make-up of schools almost exclusively from the perspective of social injustice, and have failed to consider the sometimes differing interests and perspectives of black and white families.

Looking at racial groups as interest groups does not mean defending racial inequality. Indeed, we see racial stratification as the source of racial conflicts of interest. Although there are certainly privileged black Americans and underprivileged white Americans, race continues to be strongly associated with socioeconomic advantage. It also, we will argue later, continues to be closely related to other aspects of social existence, most notably family structure, that greatly affect children's lives and influences one another. By failing to deal with the problems connected to race that exist outside of schools, we have undermined efforts to deal with racial disparities inside schools. --From the Introduction

About this edition

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0826513891
• ISBN 13: 9780826513892
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288