Literacy in Social Communities

The class discussion on Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms by Shirley Brice Heath reminded me about another ethnographic study that I read for one of my classes last semester. The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial (2007) by Susan Eaton is a great description of the everyday school life in a segregated urban school. An award-winning journalist, the author of the book, spent years at Simpson-Waverly Elementary School in Hartford, Connecticut, attended Sheff v. O’Neil hearing (against school segregation), interviewed hundreds of people including lawyers, teachers, parents, and children, and read thousands of pages of government documents to accurately present the class isolation and racial segregation of urban schools. She chronicled the civil right lawyers' battle against an unjust separation, and told the story of the elementary school teacher and her naive and innocent students who dreamed to “write about the news in the newspaper”, to be “a doctor for little kids”, or “a business manager for music group”, but they have never seen a river or a lake, and could not ride the bicycle on the street because of gunshots and drug dealers. Furthermore, when taken by their teacher, Ms. Luddy, to a suburban school for a field trip, the children from the African American and Puerto Rican families (there was no European Americans in the 4th grade and hardly a few in the whole school ) were whispering to the teacher that those kids were speaking differently and looked strange. One of the African American boys was even afraid to say something because he had never spoken with "a white person". And all this is happening in the 21st century in one of the richest states of the USA! While Heath proved that children in Roadville and Trackton have literacy traditions that differ in their nature but equally fulfill the needs of the communities, Eaton shows that the transition to school life and later to college or to job settings is rather difficult for children from "disadvantaged" communities. She gives numerous facts when the urban students drop out of school or are refused when applying for a job. Can something be done to ensure the effective education for everyone? The No Child Left Behind Act or the desegregated magnet schools project doesn't seem to work well. Or, perhaps, a better question is: how to ensure the successful transition to classroom for students with various literacy habits depending on their family and speech communities' background?