Schools, citywide school policy, and desegregation plan~ should at-tempt co create economically diverse schools with demanding curricula that are available to neighborhood residents. It is not a luxury but a vital necessjty to think about these issues

Now weak neighborhoods tend to be linked with even weaker schools, and if they wish to live in the neighborhood and use public schools, fami-lies with choices have to choose to &eal wirb educational, peer group, and neighborhood problems that they would not face in uburbia. Becau. e middle-class students of all races and white student of all classes are much more likely to use private schools or move out, the local public school tends to exaggerate the poverty and minority status of the neigh-borhood

Ultimately, for schools to achieve their full potential, they need to be linked to jobs, apprenticeships, college scholarships, and other opportuni-ties in the "outside" world.

Another way of building an infrastructure of support is to develop af-ter-chool programs that contain not only academic and.recreation com-ponents but also other services for students and their families. A related rrategy i to u e school a center of community activity. Although the involvement of regular school staff may be limited in such efforts, the idea i ro u e the school building for a broad range of adult education opportu-nities activities, and social services like counseling, employment work-hops, legal aid, and opportunitie for residents to become involved in public i sues

Exemplars such as Pio Pico show that a positive relation hip between chools and parents can be a cataly t for neighborhood action. Still, par-ents in many disadvantaged communities often avoid involvement be-cau e they feel uncomfortable in the school setting or anxious about in-teracting with educarors.74 Others feel intimidated by their lack of educarion.7

pecific initiatives-improving parent-school relations, em-ploying school-linked services for disadvantaged tudent and their fami-lies, and forming partnerships and alliances that expand the resources available to poor neighborhoods and their school -under ore the possi-bility that participants will experience new relationships, not in one grand transformation but through the practical and particular actions they en-gage in everyday

If people pay heed t0 cooperative relationships as mean by which chools and communities can be linked in beneficial and mutually rein-forcing ways, they can see that this approach is based on a social produc-tion model of power.

Implicit in this view of community development is an understanding of power as domination. Development consists of successfully resisting domination once endured.

But discru rand ancagoni m do not inevitably carry rhe day. Commu-nities can overcome conflict by bringing major groups together t0 support widely shared social aims.5

The difference between building interpersonal and intergroup crust is that the immediacy of personal interacrjon can overcome prejudgments based on past experiences.

The e initiatives call for ngaging parent in the life of the school, sometimes in school governance itself. They include providing comprehen ive ervice to the community through the school link. Some call for the school to serve as a center for neighborhood activity, while others bring chool into collaboration with bu ine and citywide alli-ances. Under the right conditions all have the potential to lessen the school-community divide and allow schools to become significant contri-butor to community development.

many educators come to see their task narrowly, and ome operate with little sense of obligation to the neigh-borhoods in which they work. Schools io low-income neighborhoods sometimes provide little more than custodial care for children and by ome accounts are a harmful force in their live .7

Teachers and administrators can begin the process of democratizing schools by transforming school-based parent events into opportunities for authentic deliberation toward a vision for children's education.

Instead of believing that speaking a language other than English is a deficit that must be overcome, teachers could recognize an opportunity for monolingual English-speaking children to learn the languages of their peers and their peers' parents. A dual-or multilanguage curriculum could honor the native languages of the community's members and foster multilingualism and academic achieve-ment for all.

I learned to step back and follow the parents' interests. J respected their strengths and sought to collaborate with them rather than dictate to them.

As educators we must shift our implicit beliefs about language dominance.

An active parent community is vital for holding schools accountable for student learning and for ensuring that local community knowl-edge is available to help solve the problems facing educators struggling to meet the needs of all students.

Language and power go hand in hand. If a person's language is not connected to the decision-making apparatus of a community, that person is effectively disempowered.

Parent engagement and disengagement often result from the social environ-ments parents encounter at school. School personnel often believe that poor and immigrant parents do not attend school events because they don't care about education, because they are uneducated, or because barriers in their lives prevent them from attending. Less often do they consider how school communications and events can make parents feel unwelcome.

As a result of their advocacy, increased access to multilingual communication spawned growing participation by many other immigrant parents from the public housing community.

A change in parents' relationships with one another, coupled with responsiveness on the part of the school, led to a more democratic representation of parents in the neigh-borhood school.

They encountered an economy increasingly stratified between rich and poor, and like many other immigrant families, they lived in a low-income community with public schools that struggled to connect with them across divi-sions of language and class.

urther, I recommend that the government adopt a fair and straightforward process to award grants and monitor states’ progres

Today, the imperative to improve our public schools is only becoming more urgent, and the challenges are becom-ing even harder for states to solve on their own

. ESSA diminished the federal government’s role in school reform, and it gave much more authority to states to implement the law, measure their students’ progress, intervene in their lowest performing schools, and evaluate the work of their teachers and principals.

. The premise here is that ESEA, with all of its good intentions, experienced some signifi-cant fails. These include the failure to consider the assets and strengths of children and fami-lies from low- income circumstances and the failure to consider pedagogy or teaching exper-tise in the implementation of the act. Research on the resilience and resources of low- income families suggests that schools can engage with families beyond a deficit- based paradigm. In-stead of presuming that professional educa-tors know better, a reauthorized ESEA can open up opportunities for significant and meaningful parent and family engag

On the surface, ESEA appears to be an ex-ample of affirmative steps that the federal gov-ernment took to right the perceived wrongs of the past. However, as is true with most educa-tion policy in the nation, ESEA reflects the po-litical wrangling and deal making that result from legislators and an electorate of disparate ideological positions and political in

espite the difficulty of operationalizing the concept of culture so that policymakers can consider it as they make decisions, it may still be useful to consider culture as a rubric for thinking about the foundations that ulti-mately undergird polic

or. These middle-income children need the jump-start that a high-quality preschool program could offer—but without a universal program, most won’t get it. If we as a nation focus on children in poverty alone, then we fail to address most of the achievement gap, school failure, and dropout problem

When thinking about potential economic returns, there are a couple additional points to keep in mind. If a substantial increase in parental earnings is one of the desired outcomes, pre-school education programs will have to be deliv-ered in conjunction with full-day chil

he United States faces serious problems that effective early education can help alleviate, most notably high rates of school failure, dropout, crime, and delinquency, as well as far too many youth who are not well prepared for the workforc

Indeed, the principal shortcoming of the Great Society was not just that it miscalculated the power of the federal government to initiate change locally but that it operated under political, structural, and ideological constraints that limited its effec- tiveness

By focusing attention on the characteristics of the poor, the culture- of-poverty thesis directed attention to the need for more and better education. Reinterpreted as cultural deprivation it provided a rationale for the expansion of federally sponsored educational programs to help the poor acquire the skills and attitudes they needed to break out of poverty.

This expansion of federal involvement in education was one of the most striking developments in the history of education in the 1960s. What most distinguished the new federal role (and what eventually made federal involvement so controversial), however, was not chiefly the large number of new programs or the scope of the federal financial commitment, which never amounted to more than 10 percent of total public school finances despite the rapid increase in federal expenditures. More important was the purpose of the new federal programs and the regulatory efforts to ensure they were fulfilled

stereotypes designed to pigeonhole them as violent, unmotivated, and lazy.

or was an offense to those around me.

we have endeavored to unveil many of the myths about people in poverty

Some theorists argue that poverty—perhaps more than any other vari-able—explains why academic performance disparities exist across groups

shift your own responses to inappropriate behavior, reframe your think-ing: expect students to be impulsive, to blurt inappropriate language, and to act “disrespectful” until you teach them stronger social and emotional skills and until the social conditions at your school make it attractive not to do those things.

ly 45 survived

Many low-SES children face emotional and social instability. Typically, the weak or anxious attachments formed by infants in poverty become the basis for full-blown insecurity during the early childhood years.

some form of exploitation . . . some defect in governmental effi ciency.

They are the deserving poor.

it results from personal moral, cultural, or biological inadequacies

There are the ones in the hallways with snide remarks from peers, on the playground with put-downs learned from parents, and in the celebration of holidays at school that can completely panic a happy family. More is caught than taught.

My mom says you're divorced and you don't have a father and that you're poor, White trash."

a chronic and debilitating condition that results from multiple adverse synergistic risk factors and affects the mind, body, and soul.

六年了。

It is easy for anyone not living in poverty to be insulated from the realities of people in poverty. It is easy to misinterpret others' actions.

When I was in seventh grade, a substitute teacher baited me by asking if I had put on clean clothes that day. I, of course, said yes, lying through my teeth. She called me on it, saying, "I know you are lying. You wore that shirt last week and the same spot is still on it." I was so ashamed. Caught between not being able to do any-thing and the lack of clothes I had to wear, my only recourse was to transform from being a child who had not missed a day of school in 7 years to being a child who missed school as frequently as I needed to in hopes that people would not notice my lack of wardrobe options.

Poverty doesn't diminish the values of family, community, independence, and faith. While no one wishes to be denied basic needs, that is not the worst part of poverty. Navigating a system that places us in a powerless situation is the worst part of poverty. Being made to feel less by overt or subtle actions is what keeps many Appalachians resistant to "outsiders."

I have seen firsthand the damage that stereotyping and misunderstanding have done to children. Schools often unkn~w-ingly perpetuate a view of failure by not valuing the strengths poor children brmg to the classroom. For poor students in Appalachia, the most discouragi~g image may be the one promoted by the media, depicting them as backwoods, ignorant isolates

This oppressive humor directed at Appalachians extends beyond Hollywood. I once had a national accreditation board member assessor who was visiting our Appalachian college tell me that the only thing he knew about Appalachia was from the movie Deliverance. He felt this comment was humorous and appropri-ate. I found it offensive.

Chinese/other Asian back-ground students do a lot more homeworkthan Mexican background students, and aremore engaged in school. This seems to saythat homework counts, that social class isnot everything, and suggests that homeworkcan at least make up for some of the disad-vantages poor children have.

There have been some recent chal-lenges to this generalization, however—claims that some children, especiallyAsian immigrant children and the childrenof Asian immigrants, do very well eventhough they come from high-poverty back-grounds. T

This advantage trans-lates to life success; children of the wealthyare far more likely to become wealthy, be-come professionals, and attain positionsof power than children of the poor(Simonton, 1994). S

A closer look at research on the BoatPeople reveals that they did well, but werenot spectacular. As noted above, their over-all GPA was 3.02, but much of this wasdue to high performance in math—with-out math, their average drops to 2.64(Caplan et. al., 1989, p. 67).

ore timedevoted to homework appears to be relatedto better grades but not necessarily tohigher performance on standardized tests.

One trend of particular interest in rural communities is the increasing number of Latino students. Between 2000 and 2009, rural schools saw a 150% increase in enrollment of Latino students (Johnson, Mitchel, & Rotherham 2014). Mo

overty in rural areas is also more persistent than in urban areas, and can be more likely to last for generations. For counties in persistent poverty, rates have remained above 20% for the past 30 years. Children growing up in these communities face challenges to their economic mobility and long-term development (Farrigan 2017). Overall, 85.3% of counties in persistent poverty are rural, which equates to about 15% of all rural counties nationally (Farrigan 2017).

o one seeks to minimize the problems of rural schools. But, at least from a national perspective, the unique needs of rural education are often obscured by their urban and suburban counterparts. One possible reason is that the majority of American students are educated in urban and suburban schools, which may lead policymakers to focus their attention and efforts on improving education where it will have the largest impact. However, such a metropolitan-centric attitude neglects a significant portion of the student population. Approximately one-half of school districts, one-third of schools, and one-fifth of students in the United States are located in rural areas (White House Rural Council 2011; NCES, 2016).

For many rural students, taking lower-level courses is not a matter of choice, but a matter of access. The average rural school offers half as many advanced mathematics courses as those in urban areas, and nearly half of rural students attend a school that offers only one to three advanced mathematics courses (Graham & Teague 2011).

Limited access to advanced courses shapes the curricular path of many rural students at the secondary level, and low rates of college attendance inhibit adult levels of educational attainment. Some of these phenomena may be influenced by the high levels of poverty present in rural areas, while others may be driven by specific barriers inherent to a rural school, such as a small and dispersed student population.

e this coun-ter-narrative as a crucial element in the development of a systematic analysis of the racism, classism, and linguicism that permeate much of urban educa-tion as well as in the development of culturally relevant curricula (Bo

eir work complements the analysis described here. Thus, while Moje emphasizes the resourcefulness of Latino teenagers, Nichols et al. note the contradictions between official pronounce-ments about family responsibility in communities where useful resources are limited. For practitioners in urban settings, the latter arguefor the repositioning of parents and children as knowledge producers and for harnessing of available sponsors and networks to the circulation of even more diverse resources for the support of young children’s learning. (p.

It appeared to symbolize both Benny’s prowess as a reader and her own expertise as a teacher. The strengths of both were evident in the Bible reading/Spanish reading lesson they created using Benny’s young people’s Bible (Lytra etal., 2016). Sitting close to his grandmother on the living room couch, Benny read Bible stories using his knowledge of Spanish and English while Doña Santos corrected his pronunciation and provided prompts. For example, when Benny—who had never been taught to read in Spanish but spoke it fluently—read “llamo” (“yamó” in Spanish) as “lámo” as if it were an English word, she provided the correct Spanish pronunciation. Doña Santos also asked comprehension questions, asking him to retell in his own words what he had read.Benny completed his homework on his own though it was sometimes checked by his grandmother. The family’s computer with Internet access was in his bedroom and, thus, the virtual world was an important literacy space for Benny that he entered sometimes on his own, sometimes with assistance.

ost weekends in the summer, they went to the rec center when the local Central American soccer league was sponsoring games. In the field, picnic, and play areas, the participants created a bilingual space for Central American identity with multiple literacies meaningful to those who could read them.

a from the U.S. Census Bureau (2012)4 (R. Piiparinen, Center for Population Dynamics, College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, personal communication, September 30, 2015) indicate that a little more than half of the people living in the neighborhood were Caucasian (56%), with substantial African American (32%) and Latino (20%) populations. The poverty level was 44%, 10 percentage points higher than that of the city as a whole (34%). Miguel lived in Lorimar, several blocks away from the school on a street lined with multistory wood frame homes like his own. There, the Latino population was slightly higher (23%) than in Fountains, the Caucasian population higher (69%), the African American population lower (23%), and the poverty level was less though still substantial (31%). Both neighborhoods had about dou-ble the percent of Latinos than the city as a whole (10%), and both had low levels of educational attainment with 32% and 28%, respectively, without a high school diploma.