ABSTRACT
The student body of Cedarbrook Middle School in a Philadelphia suburb is one-third black, two-thirds white. The town has a very low poverty rate, good schools and a long established black middle class. But an eighth-grade advanced algebra class that a reporter visited in June 2000 contained not a single black student. The class in which the teacher was explaining that the 2 in 21 stands for 20, however was 100 percent black. A few black students were taking accelerated English, but no whites were sitting in the English class that was learning to identify verbs. (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003, 1)
