r, and attitudes from their working-class pupils--all in the name of 'academic standards'" (De Castell 233)--are displaying a slavish devotion to dominant social norms. An historical look at racism will show that, despite the best intentions of liberal educational reformers, minority students fare less well than their dominant society counterparts.
In his 1976 contribution to Toward a Sociology of Education, "Educators' Theories and Pupil Identities," Bernard Coard shows what can happen when a teacher does not expect much from a student. He maintains that the black child is simply expected to do less well in school because "most teachers absorb the brainwashing that everybody else in society has absorbed--that black people are inferior, are less intelligent, etc., than white people" (207). Coard's chapter is written from a British educational system point of view, but his argument is universal. A look at early research will help to establish the background for the inferior status of non-whites.
Early pseudoscientific studies on intelligence show that no
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