Contains workable recommendations for changing the school curriculum to include more African and African-American content.

Thought. Activism. Love. These are three words that well characterize the life, career, and contributions of Edmund W. Gordon. Like his mentor W.E.B. Du Bois, Edmund W. Gordon has led a pragmatist line of inquiry, a concern with the practical application of ideas in a universe that's understood to be always changing but still informed by underlying persistent challenges.

In this examination of the American school system, a career education expert determines how existing policies have kept inner-city youth at a disadvantage—citing, among other issues, the achievement gap between black and white students—and lays the groundwork for future improvements.

Educational experts and psychologists expound upon the handling of testing and language for African American students.

BUT PAUSE ON KING, begin talking to folks, and the clutter, the noise of the rest of America falls away, and you are transported beyond the sometimes battered facade into a black America that, with astonishing welcome, reveals itself as not only more separate and self-contained than imagined but also more tightly interconnected, powerfully whole. Many black people have moved beyond the neighborhoods through which King runs (though there are now King streets in new black suburbs), but few live beyond the reach of the sounds, sentiments, and stories rooted on King. These are streets united by struggle and circumstance, by history and happenstance. One King street leads to the next and next and back again. For many whites, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are lost. For many blacks, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are found.

Cathy Jackson-Gent provides instruction about how to avoid such financial mishaps. She represents a kind of public intellectual, a field that is top heavy with those aim is to change the attitudes of millions of Whites about race. Such public intellectuals, religious and secular, perform a service. But Cathy is telling Blacks how to survive in a time when the attitude towards Blacks held by the Democratic Party is benign neglect and that of the Republican Party is benign extermination, which explains Katrina and Flint.