 Elusive Justice: Wrestling with Difference and Educational Equity in Everyday Practicereviewed by Peter Sipe - May 24, 2007  Title: Elusive Justice: Wrestling with Difference and Educational Equity in Everyday PracticeAuthor(s): Thea Renda Abu El-Haj Publisher: Routledge, New York ISBN: 0415953650 , Pages: 256, Year: 2006 Search for book at Amazon.com The last three words pledged daily by American boys and girls are cruelly ironic, given the state of education in their country. In May, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy decried a “national epidemic” in which “the dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students approaches 50%” (Spellings, 2007). Actually, flipping a coin offers better odds than those faced by pupils in many cities expecting – or, for those with a working grasp of probability, not expecting – to graduate from high school (Toppo, 2006). America does many things very well, but competently educating all of its children is not among them. This injustice drives Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, a professor at Rutgers Graduate School of Education and a self-described “anthropologist of education” (p. 3), to explore how schools try to achieve justice. The result, a pair of “ethnographic portraits” (p. 67) of two dissimilar urban schools,... (preview truncated at 150 words.) To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropriate membership. Please review your options below:
|