Stephan Thernstrom

Abigail Thernstrom

Black and Hispanic students are not learning enough in our public schools, and their typically poor performance is the most important source of ongoing racial inequality in America today—thus, say Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, the racial gap in school achievement is the nation's most critical civil rights issue and an educational crisis; it's no wonder that "No Child Left Behind," the 2001 revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, made closing the racial gap in education its central goal. An employer hiring the typical Black high school graduate or the college that admits the average Black student is choosing a youngster who has only an eighth-grade education. In most subjects, the majority of twelfth-grade Black students do not have even a "partial mastery" of the skills and knowledge that the authoritative National Assessment of Educational Progress calls "fundamental for proficient work" at their grade. No Excuses marshals facts to examine the depth of the problem, the inadequacy of conventional explanations, and the limited impact of Title I, Head Start, and other familiar reforms. Its message, however, is one of hope: Scattered across the country are excellent schools getting terrific results with high-needs kids. These rare schools share a distinctive vision of what great schooling looks like and are free of many of the constraints that compromise education in traditional public schools. In a society that espouses equal opportunity we still have a racially identifiable group of educational have-nots—young African Americans and Latinos whose opportunities in life will almost inevitably be limited by their inadequate education. When students leave high school without high school skills, their futures—and that of the nation—are in jeopardy. With successful schools already showing the way, no decent society can continue to turn a blind eye to such racial and ethnic inequality.

Closing the Racial Gap in Learning

No Excuses

I. Bernard Cohen

C. Vann Woodward

Gordon Wright

Paul Keith Conkin

John Whitney Hall

Vanderbilt University

Lawrence Stone

Lewis W. Spitz

Woodrow Borah

Richard William Leopold

Centennial Symposium on the Future of History

Centennial Symposium on the Future of History, Vanderbilt University, 1975

Kenneth Alan Lockridge

Essays in the Vanderbilt University Centennial Symposium

The Future of History

In a book destined to become a classic, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom present important new information about the positive changes that have been achieved and the measurable improvement in the lives of the majority of African-Americans. Supporting their conclusions with statistics on education, earnings, and housing, they argue that the perception of serious racial divisions in this country is outdated -- and dangerous.

One Nation, Indivisible

America in Black and White

Bernard Bailyn

Oscar Handlin

Donald Fleming

Adams University Professor Emeritus and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History Bernard Bailyn

Essays on Harvard's history provide sample glimpses of a part still significant in the twentieth century.

Glimpses of the Harvard Past

Looks at the status and progress made by African Americans since the 1940s

Abigail M. Thernstrom

Richard Sennett

Research on the frontiers of urban studies was the subject of a conference on nineteenth-century cities held in November 1968 at Yale University. These papers from the conference attempt to define what is coming to be known as the "new urban history." The cities studied range from small communities - such as Springfield, Massachusetts, and Poughkeepsie, New York - to giants like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston. While the majority of the contributions deal with American cities, four essays examine cities in Canada, England, France, and Colombia. The studies focus on the dimensions of mobility and stability in the social structure of nineteenth-century cities. Within this general frame, the essays explore such areas as urban patterns of class stratification, changing rates of occupational and residential mobility, social origins of particular elite groups, the relations between political control and social class, differences in opportunities for various ethnic groups, and the relationships between family structure and city life. In all these fields, the authors relate sociological theory to the historical materials; a complex yet readable, interdisciplinary portrait of the origins of modern city life is the result.

Essays in the New Urban History

Nineteenth-Century Cities

Stephan Thernstrom

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