Harvard Educational Review
  1. Spring 1996 Issue »

    The Politics of Culture:

    Understanding Local Political Resistance to Detracking in Racially Mixed Schools

    By Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna

    In this article, Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna examine the political struggles associated with detracking reform. Drawing on their three-year study of ten racially and socioeconomically mixed schools that are implementing detracking reform, the authors take us beyond the school walls to better understand the broad social forces that influence detracking reform. They focus specifically on the role of elite parents and how their political and cultural capital enables them to influence and resist efforts to dismantle or lessen tracking in their children's schools. Wells and Serna identify four strategies employed by elite parents to undermine and co-opt reform initiatives designed to alter existing tracking structures. By framing elite parents' actions within the literature on elites and cultural capital, the authors provide a deeper understanding of the barriers educators face in their efforts to detrack schools.

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  2. Spring 1996 Issue

    Abstracts

    Getting to Scale with Good Educational Practice
    By Richard F. Elmore
    Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildering:
    The Use and Misuse of State SAT and ACT Scores
    By Brian Powell and Lala Carr Steelman
    A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies:
    Designing Social Futures
    The New London Group
    The Politics of Culture:
    Understanding Local Political Resistance to Detracking in Racially Mixed Schools
    By Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna

    Book Notes

    Moral Development
    Edited by Bill Puka

    Places of Inquiry
    By Burton R. Clark

    Teaching and Learning in History
    Edited by Gaea Leinhardt, Isabel L. Beck, and Catherine Stainton.

    School-Based Management
    Edited by Susan Albers Mohrman and Priscilla Wohlstetter.

    Developing Home-School Partnerships
    By Susan McAllister Swap

    Over the Ivy Walls
    By Patricia Gandara

    Composition as a Cultural Practice
    By Alan W. France

    Fugitive Cultures
    By Henry Giroux

    A New Generation of Evidence
    Edited by Anne Henderson and Nancy Berla.

    Mother-Work
    By Molly Ladd-Taylor.

    Beyond Tracking
    Edited by Harbison Pool and Jane A. Page

    School-Community Connections
    Edited by Leo C. Rigsby, Maynard C. Reynolds, and Margaret C. Wang.

    Bird by Bird
    By Anne Lamott

    The International Education Quotations Encyclopaedia
    Edited by Keith Allan Noble

    Learning from Strangers
    By Robert S. Weiss

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