The difficulty in explaining why so many African American students do so poorly in school is in peeling back the layers of why their parents let them. What's even more difficult to explain is how the 1954 US Supreme Court case /Brown/, which was intended to bring equality to education, actually has contributed to the phenomenon. THE EDUCATIONAL CONTRACT is a peek into the moral dilemma of a history that has shaped a cultural pattern of failure for more than sixty years in inner-city schools. Drawing on her own childhood experiences in high-poverty schools, and her work to transform some of the worst performing schools in the United States, Dr. Sharon Washington presents a look at this pattern of failure through the lens of a "social contract." All schools have one...an unspoken, unwritten, but understood set of social expectations-that she calls an "educational contract." But at failing urban schools-the ones we see in the headlines for school closures, uninvolved parents, horrendously low test scores, and violence that has become so prevalent it, ironically, no longer makes the news-no one seems to be aware of it. What's more the "parties" of the "contract," the School and the parents among others, don't share the same values. The School believes parents should be their children's first, primary, and most important "teacher." On the other hand, most of the parents of these schools believe their only responsibility in their children's educational life is this: make sure the kid goes to school. Dr. Washington shows that this is a fixable problem-there are solutions that are possible, plausible, and doable and which can put inner-city schools on a dramatically different course. But it will take all of us. THE EDUCATIONAL CONTRACT is a penetrating and powerful call to action that takes the conversation of urban public schools to the masses.
