Ability Profiling and School Failure: One Child's Struggle to Be Seen as Competent explores the social and contextual forces that shape the appearance of academic ability and disability and how these forces influence the perception of academic underachievement of minority students. It is a powerful case study of a competent fifth grader, an African American boy growing up in a predominantly white, rural community, who was excluded from participating in science and literacy discourses within his classroom community. The case study form allows for the integration of the story of the student's struggle to be seen as competent in school, a context where his teacher perceives him as learning disabled, with Collins' own perspective as a researcher and teacher-educator engaged in a professional development effort with the teacher. The contribution of this book is to make visible the situated and socially constructed nature of ability, identity, and achievement, and to illustrate the role of educational and social exclusion in positioning students within particular identities. Highly relevant across the field of education, this book will particularly interest researchers, graduate students, and professionals in literacy and science education, curriculum and instruction, sociocultural theories of learning, discourse analysis of classrooms, research on teaching and learning, special education, social foundations, and teacher education.

What are the features of the school environment that make students' of color incorporation greater at some schools than at others? Prudence L. Carter seeks to answer this basic but bedeviling question through a rich comparative analysis of the organizational and group dynamics in eight schools located within four cities in the United States and South Africa-two nations rebounding from centuries of overt practices of racial and social inequality. Stubborn Roots provides insight into how school communities can better incorporate previously disadvantaged groups and engender equity by addressing socio-cultural contexts and promoting "cultural flexibility." It also raises important and timely questions about the social, political, and philosophical purposes of multiracial schooling that have been greatly ignored by many, and cautions against narrow approaches to education that merely focus on test-scores and resources. "There are simply not enough texts that look comparatively at the two foremost experiments with questions of race, culture, and class in the English-speaking world, the United States and South Africa. Prudence Carter's work is simultaneously scholarly and compassionate. It helps us see, in these two benighted but globally important societies, how easily things break, but also how well, when structures are in place and when human agency takes flight, individuals and the groups to which they belong flourish and grow."- Crain Soudien, Professor of Education, University of Cape Town"In this ambitious mixed-method study, Carter analyzes the social and symbolic boundaries that account for disparate educational experiences by race in the United States and South Africa. Resources are only part of the answer; equally important, she argues, are the cultural and institutional conditions that make students feel they are valued contributors of the community. Thus, school policies about hairstyle, dress codes, tracking, extracurricular activities, and language use are among the important dimensions that enable or discourage engagement in students. Educators, policymakers, and scholars alike have much to learn from this agenda-setting work."-Michele Lamont, Harvard UniversityAuthor of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class and Immigration"Prudence Carter's remarkable book shines a light on the often invisible patterns that perpetuate educational disparity in both the United States and South Africa. Stubborn Roots reveals how racial and ethnic divides are often reinforced, even in supposedly 'integrated' schools and even when many people of good will, try to eradicate them. Carter's insights illuminate how educators and schools can address these issues by becoming increasingly attuned to the socio-cultural worlds in which their students live. This book paves the way for the changes needed for historically disadvantaged groups to receive equitable, high-quality educations."-Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles Ducommun Professor of Education, Stanford University

Gaining on the Gap: Changing Hearts, Minds, and Practice serves as a guide along the journey taken by six individuals who each played a role in moving a school system along a path where race would not be a predictor for academic success. Join us as we share insights to challenges and victories as well as a close look at our own personal and professional growth.

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Product Description: Carl Milofsky studies the organizational dilemmas that confront school psychologists and the strategies they employ to work effectively in schools. He looks closely at the process of intelligence testing, showing that important racial differences exist in the testing of black as opposed to white children...read more