Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance
"Schooling, at its best, is about creating new futures for our children.Closing the Opportunity Gapdescribes education as it is and provides a vision of education as it should be. The book provides a powerful critique of the educational and social policies and practices that exacerbate the widening economic disparity between rich and poor and the growing opportunity gap for too many of our nation's youth. The authors' analyses of educational inequity and their focus on opportunity to learn offer a much needed blueprint and a new social imagination about schooling in the U.S." -Kris D. Gutiérrez, Inaugural Provost's Chair and Professor of Learning Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder."As policymakers and education leaders seek to pick up the pieces of a public education system tattered by No-Child-Left-Behind style reform, Carter and Welner's book brings clear-eyed analyses of failure and of future possibilities. In one highly readable volume, the nation's leading scholars provide evidence-based accounts of the root causes, everyday realities, and long-term consequences of the nation's weightiest educational problem-profound inequality in and out of school. And, most important, they offer comprehensive, insightful, and useful remedies. Those seeking new concepts and strategies for creating the public schools our diverse nation desperately needs and deserves need look no further than this astonishing book."-Jeannie Oakes, Director of Education and Scholarship, Ford Foundation