The difficulty in explaining why so many African American students do so poorly in school is in peeling back the layers of why their parents let them. What's even more difficult to explain is how the 1954 US Supreme Court case /Brown/, which was intended to bring equality to education, actually has contributed to the phenomenon. THE EDUCATIONAL CONTRACT is a peek into the moral dilemma of a history that has shaped a cultural pattern of failure for more than sixty years in inner-city schools. Drawing on her own childhood experiences in high-poverty schools, and her work to transform some of the worst performing schools in the United States, Dr. Sharon Washington presents a look at this pattern of failure through the lens of a "social contract." All schools have one...an unspoken, unwritten, but understood set of social expectations-that she calls an "educational contract." But at failing urban schools-the ones we see in the headlines for school closures, uninvolved parents, horrendously low test scores, and violence that has become so prevalent it, ironically, no longer makes the news-no one seems to be aware of it. What's more the "parties" of the "contract," the School and the parents among others, don't share the same values. The School believes parents should be their children's first, primary, and most important "teacher." On the other hand, most of the parents of these schools believe their only responsibility in their children's educational life is this: make sure the kid goes to school. Dr. Washington shows that this is a fixable problem-there are solutions that are possible, plausible, and doable and which can put inner-city schools on a dramatically different course. But it will take all of us. THE EDUCATIONAL CONTRACT is a penetrating and powerful call to action that takes the conversation of urban public schools to the masses.
About the Author: Dr. Sharon Washington is an education anthropologist and the founder of Anthropologi Educational Research and Development, an international firm created to bring "education" back to schools. She is also the creator and host of Education Made Visible, an education news talk show designed to bring the public back into public schools, and to take the conversation of education beyond the bureaucracy of schools. For the past eighteen years, Dr. Washington's work has taken place on the frontlines of urban education in some of the most dilapidated communities in the United States. In these communities, she has designed and implemented several programs that have helped to create more purposeful learning environments for K-12 students. This book, her first, is the result of that work. Dr. Washington has also worked in education research, policy analysis, program design, and teacher preparation in various parts of the world. That work includes school design, teacher certification, and leadership development in the United States; policy work in South Africa; research on the role of autonomous schools in the technology of a revolution in Chiapas, Mexico; the politics of education in Cuba; and the definition of school and its role in economic development in Malawi. Sharon has lectured at New School University and the University of Houston; and taught students in grades 6-12. She has worked as a journalist for six years. Her writings have appeared in the Dallas Times Herald, the Akron Beacon Journal, and New York Newsday. Dr. Washington has a PhD and a Master's degree in anthropology from The New School for Social Research in New York City. She received her undergraduate degree from Columbia University in New York City, where she graduated with a major in cinema and media theory. She studied the role of cinema and media images on "Third World" imaginations. Sharon lives in Houston, TX with her son, Dennis and his wife Tristan.