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From “Cultural Deprivation” to Cultural Capital: The Roots and Continued Relevance of Compensatory Education by John Spencer — 2012This article is a case study of compensatory education as it was developed and implemented by an innovative urban school principal in the early 1960s. I argue that while the compensatory education movement was often marred by pejorative-sounding language and inegalitarian ideas, especially as it was shaped and expanded by policy makers and district administrators, it also had roots in the work of school-based educators such as Marcus Foster, who approached it as a mechanism for raising academic achievement in urban schools. Foster won acclaim in the 1960s for his work as a principal and superintendent, only to be assassinated in 1973 by the Symbionese Liberation Army as a protest against an allegedly racist school system. I focus here on his tenure as principal of the Dunbar Elementary School in North Philadelphia from 1958 to 1963. Under Foster’s leadership, Dunbar participated in the Ford Foundation’s Great Cities School Improvement Program, which helped shape compensatory education approaches taken in the federal War on Poverty and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Even as it quickly became a centerpiece of federal policy, compensatory education was denounced by some critics for blaming low achievement on the alleged “cultural deprivation” of students and families rather than on the schools themselves. I suggest that the Dunbar School’s pilot project bridged this divide between “blaming the victim” and “blaming schools.” As practiced in such schools, compensatory education confronted both home and school factors in an effort to raise academic achievement for all urban students. In doing so, this brand of compensatory education anticipated subsequent research on the importance of the “cultural capital” that students bring from home and the quality of the teaching, curriculum, and support they receive once they arrive at school. I conclude by suggesting that, from a historical perspective, the most significant problem with compensatory education was not its emphasis on social and economic disadvantages among some students, but the fact that policy makers promised too much for it as a solution to those and other urban problems. I also suggest that this tendency is evident once again in current enthusiasm for the Knowledge Is Power Program, the Harlem Children’s Zone, and other charter school movements that share some common characteristics with the compensatory programs of the 1960s. As some policy makers and pundits point to these movements as solutions for achievement gaps, racial inequality, and poverty, it is instructive to revisit both the strengths and the limitations of the compensatory education movement of the 1960s. To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropropriate membership. Please review your options below:
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- Rethinking Compensatory Education: Historical Perspectives on Race, Class, Culture, Language, and the Discourse of the “Disadvantaged Child”
- The Debate over the Young “Disadvantaged Child”: Preschool Intervention, Developmental Psychology, and Compensatory Education in the 1960s and Early 1970s
- A Legacy of Neglect: George I. Sánchez, Mexican American Education, and the Ideal of Integration, 1940–1970
- From “Culturally Deprived” to “At Risk”: The Politics of Popular Expression and Educational Inequality in the United States, 1960-1985
- Reliving the History of Compensatory Education: Policy Choices, Bureaucracy, and the Politicized Role of Science in the Evolution of Head Start
- Reassessing the Achievement Gap: An Intergenerational Comparison of African American Student Achievement before and after Compensatory Education and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
- Contextualizing “Rethinking Compensatory Education”: The Value of a Temporal Continuity Analysis
- Schools and Poverty
- Rethinking “Rethinking Compensatory Education”
- Compensatory Education for All?
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- John Spencer
Ursinus College
E-mail Author
JOHN SPENCER, assistant professor of education, Ursinus College, is the author of In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Crisis of Urban School Reform in America (forthcoming) and other publications on education policy and the history of urban school reform. He worked for five years as a high school and middle school history teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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