A Duplicity of Equality: When Academic "Choice" Is Not Enough

• In Event: Separate and Still Not Equal: Consequences of Between- and Within-School Tracking in the 21st Century

Abstract

This paper examines how 38 African American students and 26 of their parents make sense of academic placement in a racially diverse middle school and a poor African American community. Through an ethnographic case study, four categories of students emerged that address the complexity of African American students and intergenerational struggles that students and parents confront in their home, school and community. The data reveals that in order to detrack a racially diverse school, teachers, administrators and policy makers, must move beyond the rhetoric of choice, which maintains a duplicity of equality for African American students and parents because it does not address the systematic inequalities that result in distinctive intergenerational struggles in Black neighborhoods and racially diverse schools.

Author

• Richard Lofton, Johns Hopkins University