As MacArthur award-winning educator Lisa Delpit reminds us-and as all research shows-there is no achievement gap at birth. In her long-awaited second book, Delpit presents a striking picture of the elements of contemporary public education that conspire against the prospects for poor children of color, creating a persistent gap in achievement during the school years that has eluded several decades of reform.
Delpit's bestselling and paradigm-shifting first book, Other People's Children, focused on cultural slippage in the classroom between white teachers and students of color. Now, in "Multiplication Is for White People," Delpit reflects on two decades of reform efforts-including No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, the creation of alternative teacher certification paths, and the charter school movement-that have still left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement isn't for them. In chapters covering primary, middle, and high school, as well as college, Delpit concludes that it's not that difficult to explain the persistence of the achievement gap.
Winner of an American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award and Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Book Award, and voted one of Teacher Magazine's "great books," Other People's Children has sold over 150,000 copies since its original hardcover publication. This edition features a new introduction by Delpit as well as new framing essays by Herbert Kohl and Charles Payne. In a radical analysis of contemporary classrooms, MacArthur Award-winning author Lisa Delpit develops ideas about ways teachers can be better "cultural transmitters" in the classroom, where prejudice, stereotypes, and cultural assumptions breed ineffective education. Delpit suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as primarily white teachers and "other people's children" struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics plaguing our system.