Review of The Walls around Opportunity: The Failure of Colorblind Policy for Higher Education, by Gary Orfield
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14507/er.v32.4161Author Biography
Barbara Slater Stern, James Madison University
Barbara Slater Stern, Ed.D., is a professor emerita in the Department of Middle, Secondary and Mathematics Education at James Madison University. She taught Advanced World History and A.P. United States History for 12 years as well as Black History and European Culture Studies earlier in her high school teaching career. At the university level, beginning in 1995, she taught a variety of courses including Foundations of American Education, Methods of Teaching Secondary Social Studies and Curriculum Theory and Issues. Prior to full retirement in 2021, she wrote and co-wrote numerous journal articles and book chapters focused on technology in social studies education, the history of teaching history, and teaching controversial social issues. She served for 3 years as Associate Editor and 6 years as Editor of Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, the journal of the American Association of Teaching and Curriculum. Barbara has published two books on social studies education.
References
Goodlad, J. I. (1990) Teachers for our nation's schools. Jossey-Bass.
Lightfoot, S. L (1985). The good high school: Portraits of character and culture. Basic Books.
National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983) A nation at risk: The Imperative for educational reform. A report to the nation and the Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education.
Oakes, J. (1985). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality. Yale University Press.
Powell, A., Farrar, E., & Cohen, D. K. (1985). The shopping mall high school: Winners and losers in the educational marketplace. Houghton-Mifflin.
Riley, J. L. (2025, 5/03). The tragedy of affirmative action: The affirmative action myth: Why Blacks don’t need racial preferences to succeed. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-tragedy-of-affirmative-action-black-mobility-racial-preferences-merit-b1ca70e3
Students for Fair Admission V. Harvard (600 U.S. 181 (2023).
Traub, J. (2025, March 24). Affirmative action is gone. Can class-based admissions replace it? A review of Richard D. Kahlenberg’s Class matters: The fight to get beyond race preferences, reduce inequality, and build real diversity at America’s colleges. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/books/review/james-traub-class-matters.html
[Book reviewed] Orfield, G. (2024). The walls around opportunity: The failure of colorblind policy for higher education. Princeton University Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Barbara Slater Stern
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. Readers are free to copy, display, distribute, and adapt this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Education Review, the changes are identified, and the same license applies to the derivative work.
All journal content from 1998-2020 and was published under an earlier Creative Commons license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0
