Managing Diversity

Over the past thirty years liberals and ultraconservatives, as well as parents, women's groups, and racial minorities, have taken sides in hotly contested struggles over issues of diversity in school textbooks and classroom lessons. While the media draw attention to the culture wars that fuel parental protests and campus debates, academic theorists assume that political battles over curricular ideas are key to educational transformation and profoundly affect what is recognized as official knowledge. But whether battles over school knowledge are couched in the sixties language of inclusion or the nineties discourse of multiculturalism, Managing Diversity argues that the stakes are never as high as activists hope, or fear, they will be. By examining the conditions in which school knowledge is selected and alternative curricular ideas are realized, this book illuminates how cultural and political struggles intersect with institutional processes and commercial and professional decision-making to substantially moderate the impact of textbook politics and curricular reforms on what is actually taught in schools.