The relationship between access to a quality education and social advancement can be very different depending on the society. This relationship may depend on the ethnic group and socio-economic status of the group, also. Three studies (Lukas, 1986; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988; Zweigenhaft & Domhoff, 1991) explore the relationship between access to quality education and social advancement. Each study uses a different program model and approach to investigate that relationship.
The first study (1986), contained in the book, Common Ground, by Lukas, documented the impact of desegregation in the Boston Schools by school busing on the lives of three families. The second study (1991) was a program called "A Better Chance." The ABC program involved 16 independent secondary schools with assistance from Dartmouth College, the Merrill Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The progam was founded in 1963 in response to the civil rights movement. The third study (1988) was completed by two researchers from Kean College in Union, New Jersey, who conducted an ethnographic study of four inner-city families living on Shay Avenue. This study focused on black children living in urban poverty who were perceived by their parents to be successfully learning to read and write.
Common Ground is the author's account of the Boston school desegregation crisis from 1968 to 1976. The book opens with the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, and the riots that followed. Lukas spent seven years researching the families and other key people associated with the educational system and school busing in Boston.
The three families about whom Lukas wrote were the Twymons, McGoffs and Diver. Rachel Twymon was a black woman with five children. She had been abandoned by her husband and was trying to hold her family together. She had three sons and a 13-year-old daughter who was pregnant. Alice McGoff was a poor Irish wid...