middle

there are so many mediocre books in the world. hopefully the not so random sample of books I've read over the past few days are not indicative of some accelerating devolution in research around race and ethnicity, particularly the African American middle-class and educating African American youth.

Sheesh. Can't we do any better than The Dreamkeepers and Black Picket Fences*, folks? Am I missing the really good stuff?

*I'm inclined to cut Patillo a little slack. It was her dissertation, after all. She deserves props for just getting the manuscript out. Further, I attended a presentation she gave at the ASA and liked it. Ladson-Billings, however, is too senior to have produced the book she did. I decided to use it to replace Bad Boys on my students' reading list because I generally have a number of future teachers and last semester they were hoping for a book that offered a plan of action instead of just spelling out how schools reproduce inequality. Ladson-Billings offers a plan of action. However, it hinges upon having the same cultural frame of reference as the students. She profiles 8 teachers (6 African American and 2 white). However, of the white teachers, one has an African-American cultural frame of reference and the other spent a great deal of time in African and has an equal number of white and African American friends. I fear that my mostly white suburban education students will come away from the book thinking that they don't have the ability to be good teachers of African American students.