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Linda Darling-Hammondexplains how basic resource inequities pervade the current system and describes how a better distribution of resources can yield more equitable educational outcomes. She describes four major resource-linked factors that account for unequal and inadequate educational outcomes in the United States. The first is the nation’s high level of childhood poverty, coupled with the low level of social supports for low-income children’s health and welfare, including their early learning opportunities. The second is the unequal allocation of school resources, which is made politically easier by the increasing resegregation of schools. The third involves inadequate systems for providing high-quality teachers and teaching to all children in all communities. Finally, she points to rationing of high-quality curriculum through tracking and interschool disparities.Darling-Hammond explains that these factors combined generate opportunity-to-learn barriers that can sabotage success.

This chapter examines the complex challenges of identifying and measuring what a quality education might be. It considers three proxies for quality education—school resources, internal processes and practices of schooling, and student outcomes—and then evaluates them against various normative conceptualizations of equal quality schooling.

This chapter considers the simplest explanation for the troubles of inner-city schooling: less money and more needy students. Based on well-known economic and demographic changes during the period after World War II, this explanation posits that school resources declined because the tax base eroded as industry and middle-class families moved out of the city. The schools faced an influx of disadvantaged students because economic conditions deteriorated and impoverished southern black migrants moved into the city, while the more affluent families moved out. If true, this account would still leave one with questions: why, for instance, did the problems of inner-city schooling take the specific form they did? However, at least for Chicago through 1960, trends in school funding and student disadvantage do not match popular conceptions of the postwar period. The chapter examines trends in school resources, relating these to the economic history of the city and to institutional change in the schools.

This chapter summarizes the existing evidence on the subject of school safety practices. It argues that students need firm and clearly communicated rules, but that schools across the U.S. have gone too far in this direction, resulting in harmful over-policing and punishment of students. After describing how excessive punishment harms students, it then discusses the evidence about policing in schools. The chapter concludes by describing policies and practices supported by evidence as more promising strategies for promoting school safety.

Chapter 8 focuses on schools. Traditionally schools sought to socialize children into the values they would need to have to be future citizens. More recently schools have been seen as institutions whose mission is skill acquisition, and the value socialization role has been minimized. Studies make clear that schools do shape values and that the type of classroom and school authority that children experience shapes the degree to which their initial consensual or coercive orientations toward rules strengthen or decline. If children experience transparency in the rules implemented by authorities they believe are concerned about them and their welfare, they increasingly define their relationship to rules as consensual and view the authorities as legitimate. Coercive approaches, in contrast, develop when these legitimating characteristics are absent. Coercive orientations are associated with higher levels of rule-breaking, bullying, gang activity, and criminal behavior. Despite these findings, recent developments in the school environment have increased the coerciveness of school environments.