Lies My Teacher Told Me

(Ron) #1

Random House, 1990); Robert Heilbroner, “Lifting the Silent Depression,”
New York Review of Books, 10/24/1991, 6; and Sylvia Nasar, “The Rich Get
Richer,” New York Times, 8/16/1992. Stephen J. Rose, Social Stratification in
the United States (New York: New Press, 2007), is a posterbook that shows
graphically the shrinkage of the middle class between 1979 and 2004.


9 “Income Disparity Since World War II—The Gini Index,” in “Gini
coefficient,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient , 9/2006.


10 Jere Brophy and Thomas Good summarize some of the vast literature on
social class, teacher expectation, and tracking in Teacher-Student
Relationships (New York: Holt, 1974), esp. 7-171. Ray Rist observed similar
tracking and differential teacher expectation by social class within first-grade
classes in black schools, as summarized in Edsel Erickson et al., “The
Educability of Dominant Groups,” Phi Delta Kappan (December 1972): 320.
Dale Harvey and Gerald Slatin showed that teachers willingly categorize
children by social class on the basis of photographs and hold higher
expectations for middle- and upper-class children; see “The Relationship
Between Child’s SES and Teacher Expectations,” Social Forces 54, no. 1
(1975): 140-59. See also Richard H. DeLone, Small Futures (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).


11 Sizer quoted in Walter Karp, “Why Johnny Can’t Think,” Harper’s, 6/1985,
73.


12 Reba Page, “The Lower-Track Students’ View of Curriculum,”
(Washington, D.C.: American Education Research Association, 1987).


13 Woodrow Wilson quoted in Lewis H. Lapham, “Notebook,” Harper’s,
7/1991, 10.


14 The difference is dramatically documented in the film Health Care: Your
Money or Your Life (New York: Downtown Community TV Center, c. 1977),
which compares two publicly funded neighboring hospitals in New York City,
one caring mostly for poor people, the other for a more affluent clientele.


15 Survey data from about 1979 reported in Sidney Verba and Gary Orren,
Equality in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 72-75.
Other surveys, before and after, report similar results.


16 Linda McNeil, “Defensive Teaching and Classroom Control,” in Michael
W. Apple and Lois Weis, eds., Ideology and Practice in Schooling

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