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Kevin Welner and Prudence Carter explain why it is important to shift the nation’s focus back toward an “opportunity gap” framing of educational inequity. Thinking about inputs helps us to focus on the deficiencies in the foundational components of societies, schools, and communities that produce significant differences in educational—and ultimately socioeconomic—outcomes. Thinking in terms of “achievement gaps” emphasizes the symptoms; thinking about unequal opportunity highlights the causes.Importantly, discussions of both achievement and opportunity gaps sensibly begin with the premise that we as a nation must act to redress the serious inequities that exist between and within schools, as well as among different people, groups, and communities across the country. Both discussions include an understanding that outcomes should be measured, analyzed, and addressed. Welner and Carter argue thattest-score and attainment differences will not disappear until policy is dedicated to changing the conditions that shape and impede achievement.

Carter and Welner bring together the evidence compiled by the book’s authors, describing a wide and deep opportunity gap arising from the accumulated impact of many factors: segregation in housing in schooling; differences in resources between poor and wealthier children; differences in access to high-quality preschool; between-school differences in teacher training, teacher experience, and teacher quality, as well as in other resources, such as technology, safe buildings with heating and air conditioning, textbooks, working bathrooms, and class size; differences in the provision of engaging, deep, project-based learning versus instruction focused on raising testscores; stratified school opportunities arising from school choice policies; the widespread provision of culturally unresponsive curriculum and instruction; and the failure to value and build on the strengths of language minority children. The authors offer a summary of policy recommendations that their volume collaborators and they argue would help the United States create a fair and equitable system for its millions of school-aged youth.

This chapter explores the demographic trends in the United States of youth for whom youth social entrepreneurship may be most important, those framed by the Opportunity Gap, conceptualized by the field of education to better explain outcome disparities for youth of color and/or from low-income families. Academic disciplines and the nonprofit sector have embraced this framework and furthered it by identifying the youth “haves” and “have-nots” depending on their access to opportunities of many kinds: educational and economic among them. Youth without, or with fewer, opportunities tend to also lack connections of many kinds that can inhibit their educational, employment, housing, and health outcomes. This, then, is the central concern of this chapter: how can youth social entrepreneurship be part of the solution for disconnected youth?

Chapter 2 focuses on the importance of gaining a greater understanding of students’ lives and experiences to build on these experiences within the music classroom. The chapter opens with an examination of the “opportunity gap,” a counter to the frequently described “achievement gap” that is often associated with particular student populations. This section explains the documented structural inequities faced by many of these student populations even before formal school ever begins. The chapter also examines the concept of a “culture of power” that often leads teachers and administrators to misunderstand and misinterpret the behaviors of their students. Strategies for assisting students are provided. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the important issues of student race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, along with implications for the music classroom.

Teachers and administrators explain the educational differences between students. Such explanations focus on biological and cultural arguments where Asian Americans are assumed to value schooling and hard work more than Latinas/os. Along with a discussion of the general silence regarding Whites, white privilege, and whiteness in general at the school, there is also consideration of how federal educational policies that emphasize performance on standardized tests influence school discourses and practices.

Beginning with students’ reflections on the racial/ethnic divides on campus, this chapter provides the book’s socio-political and academic context. I challenge the limitations of studies and policies that focus on a so-called achievement gap. I then explain the neoliberal and neoconservative context, how this work adds to the academic scholarship, the book’s macro-meso-micro framework (which includes a brief history of Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and Korean Americans). The introduction ends with a chapter outline.

Students describe the school policies and practices influencing their educational trajectories and peer relationships. Of particular importance are the significance of segregated and unequally valued middle schools and the inequalities attached to a rigid track system that includes placement in the International Baccalaureate Program, Advancement Via Individual Determination Program, or non-honors college preparatory classes.

This chapter reveals the intensification of a tutoring industry. Some students—primarily middle and upper middle class Asian American students–receive extensive tutoring in Chinese schools and from for-profit organizations. In contrast, many Latina/o students across class position receive no tutoring or limited tutoring. Such unequal access to tutoring fuels academic and social differences, and some teachers are even changing their curriculum in ways that benefit students with tutoring.

Reflecting on my experiences sharing the research findings with the school, this chapter conveys the urgency and the difficulty of change. While presenting, I learned that some heard my analysis through the same frameworks that I aimed to critique. Others found it difficult to transform school practices in the current period of schooling where assessment drives education.

Beginning with a discussion of a program that was established at the school after my research, this chapter discusses what the high school teaches us about the detrimental impacts of the current state of U.S. schooling. In many ways, the high school under study is any-school USA. Just as it is premised on competition, individualism, and assimilation, it overlooks the significance of opportunity and social gaps and the wealth of knowledge, experiences, and resources that its students, their families, and the surrounding communities possess.

The chapter focuses on the academic and social hierarchies at the school and students’ roles in perpetuating such hierarchies. Examples focus on how students of color are differently labeled “smart,” “stupid,” “sporty,” or “stupid” while White students are believed to be less identifiable. There are also examples of anti-immigrant posturing among some Asian Americans that is linked to larger assimilationist imperatives.

Students reveal unequal patterns of surveillance and regulation by race/ethnicity, class, gender, and academic track. While students in the school’s top classes describe having a free pass to move around campus, students outside of these courses, especially Latinas/os, encounter control and punishment. Asian Americans, on the other hand, express more academic restrictions where they are held to higher standards because of the racialized academic profiling that expects them to excel in their courses.

This chapter exposes forms of resistance. From claiming an identity, playing with stereotypes, to defying typification, students creatively carve out their sense of selves and challenge others’ perceptions. Organizationally, a smaller group of students and teachers create alternative campus spaces in classroom and through the student organization MEChA that are inclusive, oppositional, or overly political.