A Chance to Learn

How - and why - have children of blacks, American Indians, Mexican-Americans, and Puerto Ricans been deprived by and often excluded from the so-called American educational system? In this classic 1977 study of a problem neglected or undervalued in most standard histories of American education, Professor Meyer Weinberg seeks the answers. Concretely and empirically, he shows that from their forebearers' first contact with dominant American society, minority children have been shockingly disadvantaged by the public schools. Instead of accepting this passively, however, minority group parents and leaders have struggled against it. Their efforts and those of others to secure the amount and quality of schooling that majority offspring get almost routinely were largely failures. Dr Weinberg claims this was inevitable but says that without a clear understanding that efforts were made, no further efforts can ever succeed.