Despite the Best Intentions

How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools

Author: Amanda E. Lewis, John B. Diamond

Narrated by: David Sadzin

Write A Review

At a Glance

Format
Digital Audiobook

Duration
08:51.39

Published: 8th October 2019

Digital Audiobook

$33.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.50 with

Instant Digital Delivery to your Kobo Reader App

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 all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers?

Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, John Diamond and Amanda Lewis have created a rich and disturbing portrait of the achievement gap that persists more than fifty years after the formal dismantling of segregation. As students 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.

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.