Forced to Fail

Stephen J. Caldas is professor of educational foundations and leadership at Hofstra University (NY). He has authored or co-authored more than 45 publications, including (with Carl Bankston) A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana, which was awarded the Louisiana Library Association Literary Award for 2002.Carl L. Bankston is professor of sociology at Tulane University, New Orleans. He has been author or coauthor of several previous books, including Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (winner of the 1999 Thomas and Znaniecki Award and the Mid-South Sociological Association's 2000 Distinguished Book Award).

According to Caldas and Bankston, efforts to enhance racial mixing in schools have been self-defeating. They contend that the premise of desegregation was that schools could redesign American society; however, they believe this clashed with the goals of parents who were concerned only with benefiting their own children....In their new book, the authors look at a wide range of secondary sources to conclude that school people in the U.S. face a paradox. While minority youth might profit from attending middle-class schools, middle-class parents abandon schools that must desegregate. Since the authors believe that racial desegregation exacerbates the problems schools and communities face, they favor strengthening neighborhood schools....Recommended.

• 1 School Desegregation: A Policy in Crisis2 How Did We Get Here?3 The Demographic Transformation of America4 It Takes "A Certain Kind" of Village to Raise a Child5 The Political Economy of Education and Equality of Educational Opportunity6 Rational Self-Interest vs. Irrational Government Policy7 School Desegregation and the Racial Achievement Gap8 A New Perspective of Race and Schooling: Attaining the Dream