{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.029497805948317895, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009263773768893223, 'mean_word_length': 5.016129032258065, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Reviews: Rank Discriminations: Critical Studies of Schooling and the “Mainstream” in Educational Research

I submitted this review to ER because I felt it necessary to counter the impression left by Rezai-Rashti's sympathetic discussion of this book in a recent issue of this journal (RezaiRashti, 1997). That review implies, as does Ladwig, that his book offers a friendly critique of authors such as myself who have, over the years, been engaged in a critical analysis of schooling. My general assessment of the book is, however, "With friends like this, who needs enemies?" I will explain. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, inspired by British and European writers such as Michael R D. Young, Karl Mannheim, and Karl Marx, a small group of U.S. scholars began to look at public school knowledge and experience from a point of view quite unlike that of the educational and sociological establishment. As James Ladwig notes, Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, and I were among the first sociologists of school knowledge to undertake work that placed the social context of schooling at the center of the analysis: Social class, societal transformation, and the consequences of economic and political power became categories linking theoretical explanations and empirical research. Passionate in the belief that education was implicated not only in social inequality but in possible social transformation, we looked inside "the black box of schooling" and found evidence potentially useful in the struggle against oppression. As the field developed in the middle and late 1980s, other writers (Madeline Grumet, Patti Lather, and Elizabeth Ellsworth, among many others) enlarged the analysis to include race and gender as explanatory concepts. There were, of course, disagreements among the contributors to a now very large group. Importantly, this group of radical scholars was but one example of the increasing use in social science of class, race, and gender critiques of mainstream theories of meritocracy and objective social science. Indeed, by the early 1990s, in education as in a number of other fields, identifying discrimination along various dimensions and acknowledging evidence of political and economic inequality in the institutions under study had become the vocation of a fair number of mainstream scholars as well as of the "radicals" in a number of disciplines. The original band of self-named "cultural workers" in education are still writing in support of social justice. Most are well known and accepted by the educational mainstream. For example, Michael Apple is an internationally acclaimed figure; editors at SUNY Press, where Henry Giroux published several books, told me that his books have been among their best sellers; articles I wrote in the early 1980s have been reprinted by others in 18 edited volumes and are still being reprinted. My book Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform, published last October by Teachers College Press, was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and after two months, went into a second printing. Other contributors to the field such as Madeline Grumet, Bill Pinar, Lois Weis, and Philip Wexler are respected deans of colleges of education. James Ladwig, the author of the book under review here, would have us believe that the work done by this group has been little noticed and is of little use. He implies that the scholarship was undertaken not because of an antipathy to social injustice, but to "carve a distinctive space within the Academy" (p. 102). Ladwig further argues that the scholarship was tainted by alternative theories and methodologies that "virtually guarantee^] self-marginalization" (p. 105) and "self-assigned isolation" (p. 131) to the authors. He critiques the work of these authors for theoretical inconsistency (for moving, for example, from a class analysis to ones based on gender and race) and for using the lens of ideology to describe what they saw in schools. Moreover, these critical thinkers have "drifted too far toward . . . sociologically irrelevant theorizing" (p. 154).