Reaching and Teaching Marginalized Children

Abstract

Despite the “worldwide revolution” in educational enrollment during the twentieth century, a clear division continues to separate marginalized children from their peers: the quality of their teachers. Ample evidence from the United States and growing cross-national evidence demonstrate that children who are poor, who come from ethnic or racial minority groups, who have less educated parents, or who live in rural areas have access to less qualified teachers than their more advantaged peers. Given considerable evidence of the importance of teachers for children’s academic success, the teacher quality division between more and less advantaged children may be as influential in determining these children’s futures as access to formal education was one hundred years ago. In this chapter, we introduce our rationale for studying teachers of marginalized children and we describe the objectives, contributions, and organization of the book.