Unfinished Business: Closing the Racial Achievement Gap in Our Schools - Paperback

by Pedro A. Noguera (Editor), Jean Yonemura Wing (Editor)

In this groundbreaking book, co-editors Pedro Noguera and Jean Yonemura Wing, and their collaborators investigated the dynamics of race and achievement at Berkeley High School-a large public high school that the New York Times called "the most integrated high school in America." Berkeley's diverse student population clearly illustrates the "achievement gap" phenomenon in our schools. Unfinished Business brings to light the hidden inequities of schools-where cultural attitudes, academic tracking, curricular access, and after-school activities serve as sorting mechanisms that set students on paths of success or failure.

Back Jacket

FRESH INSIGHT ON RACIAL DYNAMICS AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT IN SCHOOLS

"Unfinished Business illuminates the challenges in overcoming the current inequities in public education. Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, this book exposes a 'tale of two schools' where students walk through the same high school doors but remain racially and academically segregated within--a condition mirrored in urban schools and districts across the nation. The authors offer a hopeful, yet urgent, call to invest in youth on the front side of life and to hold fast to the vision of a future where all children can truly learn, achieve, and dream to their highest potential."
--REVEREND JESSE L. JACKSON, SR., president and founder, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition

"It should concern us deeply as scholars, policymakers, and practitioners that at one of our nation's best schools--one that is deemed as 'working' and highly successful according to official accounts--children's destinies are no less circumscribed by race and class. This book contains a clear wake-up call in its masterful account of deep and abiding commitments to educational equity."
--ANGELA VALENZUELA, Haskew Centennial Professor, Department of Curriculum & Instruction and Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas at Austin

"It's a powerful experience to immerse oneself in this book. The many voices of teachers--and even of kids and families--reveal that many inequities remain hidden in our schools. Unfinished Business shows that there's work to be done, and provokes us into thinking more deeply about answers."
--DEBORAH MEIER, senior scholar, New York University, and founding principal of Central Park East schools in Harlem and Mission Hill in Roxbury

Author Biography

THE EDITORS

PEDRO A. NOGUERA is a professor in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University, the executive director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, and the co-director of the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Education in Metropolitan Settings (IGEMS).

JEAN YONEMURA WING is affiliated with UC ACCORD (University of California All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity) and is a researcher in the Oakland Unified School District.