ABSTRACT
Tonight is College Information Night and Lincoln High School is teeming with energy and anticipation. But as a sincere effort to regard the community as a partner in its children's education rather than a drain on it, the bilingual college session provides a glimmer of hope in school–community relations. In schools, communities of color become a problem for an educational system that vacillates between assimilating them into Eurocentrism and forsaking them as drains on the system. Another species of arguments explaining the relationship between schools and communities of color comes from Pierre Bourdieu's sociological concept of "cultural capital". A funds of knowledge approach to minority communities opposes the deficit orientation by considering the worth of people according to their own standards regarding what knowledge is of most worth and value, and not from an external lens that disparages them. The school–community relationship is a key node in understanding racism in education as well as ways to counteract it.
