Author Bio

Carl L. Bankston III is an associate professor of sociology at Tulane University and co-author of the prize-winning Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States. Stephen J. Caldas has been a public school teacher and worked as the psychometrician for the Louisiana Department of Education. He has authored or co-authored numerous articles on school achievement and is currently associate professor in the department of educational foundations and leadership at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.

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Main Description

Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the United States still has a long way to go to attain true integration of our educational system.

Using extensive interviews and a wealth of statistical information, Bankston and Caldas examine the failed desegregation efforts in Louisiana as a case study to show how desegregation has followed the same unsuccessful pattern across the United States. Strong supporters of the dream of integration, Bankston and Caldas show that the practical difficulty with desegregation is that academic environments are created by all the students in a school from the backgrounds that all the students bring with them. Unfortunately, the disadvantages that minority children have to overcome affect schools more than schools can help remedy these disadvantages.

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Reviews

This troubling book is must reading for federal judges, lawyers and any other citizens purporting to have a serious, selfless interest in Civil Rights.
--Louisiana History

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Winner, Louisiana Literary Award 2003

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Table of Contents

Contents
Figures ix
Tables xi
Acknowledgments xv

Introduction
The Problem of Writing about Race 1

1 Louisiana's Schools Prior to Desegregation:
The Roots of a Racially Divided Society 21

2 The Struggle to Desegregate the Schools: Overcoming Injustice through the Schools 37
3 New Orleans: The Beginning and the End of a Process 54
4 East Baton Rouge: School Desegregation and Unintended Consequences 83
5 School Desegregation and White Flight in Lafayette Parish 106
6 Louisiana and the Dilemma of Desegregation 140
7 The Academic Consequences of Desegregation and Resegregation:
Revisiting the Harm and Benefit Thesis 186
8 Recommendations 205
Appendix A: Single-Parent Families and Educational Environment 223
Appendix B: Multilevel Statistical Examination of the Harm and Benefit Thesis 231
Notes 247
Index

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