Still Failing The Continuing Paradox of School Desegregation [Hardcover]

Still Failing reveals Americas daunting reality of the persistent racial gap in academic achievement despite decades of judicial actions on school desegregation. ?Critical of top-down social engineering, the authors offer an alternative account to explain why desegregation still fails to meet its intended goal, guiding readers toward a better understanding of how race, class, and social networks influence educational outcomes and help them envision a more realistic approach to equal access to educational opportunities.There are things we think we know that we in fact need to be reminded of now and then. Caldas and Bankston teach us that the way we approached Americas race problems in the 1950s and 1960s doesnt apply gracefully to the 2010s, even when it comes to noble-sounding concepts such as desegregation of schools. Still Failing: The Continuing Paradox of School Desegregation points us to how we can get kids of all colors educated in an America long past the stark oppositions of the era of Brown v. the Board of Education.Caldas and Bankston have done an excellent job in dissecting the ongoing dilemma of school desegregation. They bring solid credentials to the job, having worked on numerous school desegregation cases and authored numerous research studies.?They argue, convincingly, that the issue of race is more about economic and family inequality than racial differences, and that coercive policies to bring about racial or socioeconomic balance in schools have been counter-productive. They ask that? we let schools be schools instead of laboratories for social experiments, and they endorse policies that stress individual family choices for the of type of school program that best serves their children.This book includes an analysis of the most significant Supreme Court cases that have been decided in the ten years since the first edition of the book appeared. The authors consider the important implications of these recent rulings for the future of school desls¢