Finding #6: The challenges faced by Special Strategies schools attempting to educate large numbers of students at risk were often enormous, and resources with which to address those challenges were often in short supply.
America in the 1980s and 90s has produced fewer and fewer high-wage, low-skill jobs. This trend seems unlikely to reverse itself in the early years of the 21st century (see, for example, Gates, 1995; Kasarda, 1995). Rather, the skills needed to access and produce information, be a responsible citizen, and obtain and hold a job with a reasonable wage increasingly require that a young person obtain a high-quality education.
In our three years of fieldwork we visited several nominated-as-exemplary schools where instructional materials were too often scarce and instruction far from optimal, where paint was peeling in classrooms and halls, where teachers told us that on Mondays some students devour their federally subsidized free breakfast because it is the first regular meal they have had since their Friday free lunch, where teachers cars were parked surrounded by barbed wire, where armed guards met visitors at the door, and in one case, where people had been found dead in the elementary school stairwells between Special Strategies visits. It was easy for us to understand why Kozol (1991) wrote Savage Inequalities and Kotlowitz (1991), There Are No Children Here.
