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The Urban School: A Factory for Failure

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Now featuring a new introduction by education policy expert Ray C. Rist , The Urban School: A Factory For Failure is a chilling study of how inner-city public schools help to reinforce class distinctions from a very early age. With an emphasis upon how kindergarten, first grade, and second grade force young children into social tier structures, and consequently are particularly harsh and handicapping to the poorest members of the population, The Urban School is a timely and much needed wake-up call to a educational policy and contemporary social problem that urgently needs to be addressed across the country and in every urban school district.

Though first published in 1972, this book is still a great read. It had long been known that ability grouping and family socioeconomic status were closely associated, working to the advantage of the relatively affluent and the disadvantage of the poor. The mechanisms involved in generating this association, however, were not well understood. Rist's work taught us that socioeconomic advantage is often unselfconsciously mistaken as evidence of superior intelligence. As a result, classrooms organized nominally on the basis of ability are actually organized on the basis of socioeconomic status. Rist, in short, identified and explained one of the mechanisms whereby ability grouping works to the advantage of the affluent and further diminishes the prospects of the poor.

Though based on field work done in the late 1960's, Rist's book is still quite pertinent. Education has become more organizationally complex, but so have the mechanisms that foster inheritance of socioeconomic status from one generation to another. For a striking example, look at the remarkably close association between SAT scores and family income reported in the Brookings Institution's 1998 volume Getting Ahead.

Rist's book is an exemplary ethnography, and its title should not discourage rural educators: it applies to them, as well. The book's educational policy implications, if ever taken seriously, could profoundly improve schooling, making the U.S. a much more meritocratic nation.