The Civil Rights Road to Deeper Learning: Five Essentials for Equity

This concise and compelling book outlines the key civil rights conditions that are essential to deeper learning—the skills and knowledge that students need to succeed in 21st-century jobs and life. It describes schools that enable young people, including those traditionally furthest from opportunity, to develop into caring and critical problem solvers, effective communicators, collaborators, and scholars. The book also describes the community and school inequities that have created persistent obstacles to these goals and the civil rights actions that have been and continue to be needed to remove them. These include policies and practices that ensure safe and healthy communities, equitable investments in public schools, supports for competent teachers, strategies for welcoming and nurturing school climates, and innovative curricula.

Many students, because of their social-class, racial, ethnic, and linguistics characteristics, are not given the learning opportunities that will enable them to attain the deeper learning essential for functioning in a diverse global world and workforce.

—James A. Banks

The authors examine the civil-rights–based pathways that lead to these goals, highlighting examples of exemplary schools that offer the kind of deeper learning that engages and empowers students. This successor to Linda Darling-Hammond’s Grawemeyer Award–winner, The Flat World and Education, is a big-picture view of what constitutes deeper learning―where it is found and what enables it―and what must be done to address the learning needs of all children.