their decision-making processes. This
vignette is particularly telling:
One morning I interviewed Sylvie, a viva-
cious middle-class white mother whose
daughter attended a popular alternative
school. Sylvie was thrilled with the
school—it was a perfect fit for her shy
daughter, a nurturing close-knit com-
munity with project-based learning and
a “child-centric” curriculum. The prin-
cipal knew every student, and kids called
teachers by their first names. The one
downside, Sylvie said, was that the school
was not as diverse as she would like. For
some reason it had trouble attracting stu-
dents of color, particularly black students.
Later that afternoon I interviewed
Bernice, a middle-class black mom who
had chosen a large traditional school
for her “social butterfly” daughter.
Although the school had low test scores
and a mediocre reputation, Bernice had
been impressed when she visited. She
thought the principal was pushing kids to
excel, and she liked the “college-bound”
program that encouraged students to
start thinking about college early. She
was also attracted by the curriculum,
which focused on basic skills. As Bernice
described the different schools she
considered and the various factors she
weighed in choosing among them, I
noticed that she did not mention Sylvie’s
alternative school as an option. Had she,
I asked, considered sending her daughter
there? “Oh no,” Bernice replied. “That
school, it doesn’t have any discipline or
structure whatsoever. Do you know,” she
went on in a horrified voice, “they even let
the kids call teachers by their first names!”
(Calvo, 2007, p.; 32)
We mustn’t overgeneralize from a
single story about two moms. Not all
affluent white parents want progressive,
warm-and-fuzzy schools, and not all
black parents want highly structured,
traditional ones. But there is some
validity to this stereotype, and it’s hardly
a secret: For decades, magnet school
administrators have placed Montessori
schools in black neighborhoods as a
way to draw white families and “
back-to-basics” schools in white neighborhoods as a way to draw black families.
The approach tends to work.
In the 1990s, Petronio (1996) studied
the public school choice program of
TRENDS of the TIMES
The suburban poverty
rate in the United States in
2012 ;as 11. 3 percent.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved
from www.census.gov/hhes/www
/cpstables/032012/pov/ POV41_000.htm
Cambridge, Massachusetts. She found
that parents tended to be either traditionalists, who wanted their kids
to learn basic skills and get the “right
answers,” or alternative-school aficionados, who sought environments that
“stimulated curiosity and encouraged
exploration.” The alternative school
parents were usually middle-class professionals, whereas the traditionalists
came from poorer backgrounds.
The conundrum for diverse schools,
then, is how to meet the varied preferences and demands of differing parent
groups and family backgrounds. But,
in truth, the issue goes deeper because
there’s also reason to believe that what
poor and affluent kids need from school
is not quite the same thing.
Progressive Education:
Good for White Folks Only?
In 1986, Lisa Delpit published “Skills
and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive
Black Educator,” an article that soon
became one of the most requested
in the Harvard Educational Review’s
history. Delpit was born in Louisiana,
where, as she put it, her teachers “in
the pre-integration, poor black Catholic
school that I attended corrected every
other word I uttered in their effort to
coerce my black English into sometimes
hypercorrect Standard English forms
acceptable to black nuns in Catholic
schools” (Delpit, 1995, p.; 11).
Although she didn’t totally reject the
tenets of progressive education, Delpit
eventually adopted more traditional
methods, which helped her black students improve their reading and writing
skills. Her article sparked an enormous
response from other black teachers, who
believed that the fashionable progressive
methods were good for “white folks”
but not for kids of color (at least, not for
poor kids of color). And those teachers
might have been right.
Enter E.;D. Hirsch, who, in the mid-
1980s, was a relatively low-profile
English professor at the University of
Virginia. In 1987, he published a book
that marked a turning point in his
career—and arguably in American
