d honors classes. As one high school counselor notes, "It's a political system. If you are a parent and want your student in honors English, [the student] is there" (Chmelynski, 1998, p. 50). One parent, who is an attorney, even sued a teacher at a wealthy suburban school after the teacher had given the parent's child a D (Reinstein, 1998, p. 29). Wealthy parents feel a greater sense of entitlement and have higher expectations for their schools than low income parents. In contrast, low income parents either lack the financial resources or the feeling of empowerment to effect change in their children's schools.
Reducing social inequity requires special intervention to ensure that disadvantaged students perform at the same level of achievement as their peers at wealthy school districts. In the past, pre-school programs such as Head Start were believed to hold the key. Today, social scientists realize that a more comprehensive approach is necessary to bridge the equity gap.
In North Carolina, a school program called the Abecedarian Project has proven that early and extended intervention can make a difference in education. The Abecedarian Project provides the children of low income African American parents with a wide range of intensive services. The intervention starts at infancy and continues until the child is eight years old. Included are infant care, preschool, kindergarten, and school-age services. In addition, parents are given support. As a result of this intensive intervention, children in the Abecedarian Project score higher on all measures of learning and intelligence than children who have not gone through the program. This heightened level of achievement persists long after the child is no longer enrolled in the program: "By age 15, Abecedarian children were half as likely to have been assigned to special education or to have been retained" (Slavin, 1998, p. 9). North Carolina's Abecedarian Project de...