Despite the Best Intentions How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools

On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when many of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students lag behind their peers in key outcomes? Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, Amanda Lewis and John Diamond have created a rich and illuminating portrait of the so-called "achievement gap" that persists more than fifty years after the formal dismantling of segregation. As student's progress from elementary school to middle school to high school, their level of academic achievement increasingly tracks along racial lines, with white and Asian students maintaining higher GPAs and standardized testing scores, taking more advanced classes, and attaining better college admission results than their black and Latino counterparts. Lewis and Diamond challenge many common explanations of the 'racial achievement gap,' exploring what race actually means at Riverview, and why it continues to matter. In this second edition of the book, Lewis and Diamond return to Riverview to update what has changed and what remains the same in the high school. In new chapters, they present a complex story of concerted efforts to transform educational opportunities in Riverview alongside persistent resistance to those efforts. They also lead the readers through a discussion of the lessons they've learned working with school systems and suggest strategies for change rooted in those lessons. An in-depth study with far-reaching consequences, 'Despite the Best Intentions' revolutionizes our understanding of both the knotty problem of academic disparities and the larger question of the color-line in American society"--