School Matters: Why African American Students Need Multiple Forms of Capital

The achievement gap, regrettable but real, haunts the future of the African American community and by extension that of America. Bartee and Brown (both education, U. of Mississippi, Oxford) deconstruct the gap and find four types of capital implied within it: economic, human, cultural and social. They find unequal distribution of economic capital in homes and schools affects the distribution of the other forms of capital. They assert that the ability to acquire and control economic capital greatly impacts individuals' ability to negotiate in any school setting, and that efforts to improve other forms of capital are therefore still ineffective when they are attempted at all. Their examples show that capital follows capital, and the achievement gap is related directly to unequal distribution of all forms of capital at a basic level. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)