The issues surrounding the academic under-performance of the government secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago, compared with the denominational assisted schools have been debated for many years. An equally persistent issue surrounds the placement in the secondary schools and the inequalities which many persons perceive to be inherent in the process. In this masterly study, Professor Ramesh Deosaran examines the nature and dimensions of inequality in opportunities for education, and their relationship to gender, race, family background and socio-economic status. He effectively demonstrates that unequal opportunity and unequal outcomes are embedded in the country's education system - a legacy from the colonial past that institutionalized a system of schools run by the government and those run by religious denominations but supported by the state. Deosaran points to the 1960 Concordat which enshrined the rights of these denominational assisted schools and argues the case for revisiting the status quo to debate whether to revise, scrap or enshrine the Concordat in the constitution. Deosaran argues that the structural inequity in the education system and its outcomes amount to discrimination against the most disadvantaged groups with serious debilitating implications for the country's social and economic progress and its status as a modern democracy. He calls for a removal of the masks of inequality and discrimination and appeals for sustained, carefully planned and data-driven reforms in Trinidad and Tobago's education system. The study is multi-disciplinary in nature drawing from various disciplines, including politics of education, the sociology of education, the economics of education and educational psychology, backed up by data from his own research and from a variety of reports dating back to the 1960s.

This book is intended to provide critical readings for criminology courses. The authors all see crime as both a social and a political process. That is, what comes to be defined as criminal, how society responds to crime and why individuals become entangled in the criminal justice system are often the result of individual and systemic social inequalities. That is crime and the CJS both produce and reproduce class, race and gender inequalities in society. The chapters in this book take up a number of empirical, theoretical and substantive issues in criminology and mostly focus on Canada. These include wrongful convictions (which are most likely to ensnare people who are on the margin of society), how the police and other representatives of the CJS operate within an institutional and cultural context that, by and large, sees racialized Canadians as most likely to be criminal, that youth crime is really a criminalization of young people who are poor and Indigenous, as well as connecting terrorism to the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, among others.

First published in 1979, Inequality, Crime, and Public Policy integrates and interprets the vast corpus of existing research on social class, slums, and crime, and presents its own findings on these matters. It explores two major questions. First, do policies designed to redistribute wealth and power within capitalist societies have effects upon crime? Second, do policies created to overcome the residential segregation of social classes have effects on crime? The book provides a brilliantly comprehensive and systematic review of the empirical evidence to support or refute the classic theories of Engles, Bonger, Merton, Cloward and Ohlin, Cohen, Miller, Shaw and McKay, amongst many others. Braithwaite confronts these theories with evidence of the extent and nature of white collar crime, and a consideration of the way law enhancement and law enforcement might serve class interest.

The Economics of Education: A Comprehensive Overview, Second Edition, offers a comprehensive and current overview of the field of that is broadly accessible economists, researchers and students. This new edition revises the original 50 authoritative articles and adds Developed (US and European) and Developing Country perspectives, reflecting the differences in institutional structures that help to shape teacher labor markets and the effect of competition on student outcomes. - Provides international perspectives that describe the origins of key subjects, their major issues and proponents, their landmark studies, and opportunities for future research - Increases developing county perspectives and comparisons of cross-country institutions - Requires no prior knowledge of the economics of education

This book examines key relationships between material circumstances and crime, and analyzes the areas of social policy – in particular social security and labour market policy – that are most important in terms of dealing with inequality at the lower end of the income hierarchy. It seeks to explain why inequality is linked to offending behaviour and the evidence underpinning explanations for this, and looks in detail at the relationship between offending and anti-social behaviour and its management through social policy interventions. Crime and Inequality draws upon both criminological and social policy approaches to understand this vital relationship, moving beyond criminological approaches which often fail to analyse the way the state attempts to manage poor material circumstance, offending and anti-social behaviour through social policy. The main aims of the book are threefold: to draw upon the disciplines of both criminology and social policy to understand the relationship between crime and inequality; to provide an in-depth analysis of those aspects of social policy that have a bearing on the context, management and punishment of offending behaviour; to examine government crime and anti-social behaviour policies in the context of social security and labour market policies, and to identify the tensions that have resulted from attempts to address social justice issues while also making individuals responsible for their actions.

As the incomes of affluent and poor families have diverged over the past three decades, so too has the educational performance of their children. But how exactly do the forces of rising inequality affect the educational attainment and life chances of low-income children? In Whither Opportunity? a distinguished team of economists, sociologists, and experts in social and education policy examines the corrosive effects of unequal family resources, disadvantaged neighborhoods, insecure labor markets, and worsening school conditions on K-12 education. This groundbreaking book illuminates the ways rising inequality is undermining one of the most important goals of public education—the ability of schools to provide children with an equal chance at academic and economic success. The most ambitious study of educational inequality to date, Whither Opportunity? analyzes how social and economic conditions surrounding schools affect school performance and children’s educational achievement. The book shows that from earliest childhood, parental investments in children’s learning affect reading, math, and other attainments later in life. Contributor Meredith Phillip finds that between birth and age six, wealthier children will have spent as many as 1,300 more hours than poor children on child enrichment activities such as music lessons, travel, and summer camp. Greg Duncan, George Farkas, and Katherine Magnuson demonstrate that a child from a poor family is two to four times as likely as a child from an affluent family to have classmates with low skills and behavior problems – attributes which have a negative effect on the learning of their fellow students. As a result of such disparities, contributor Sean Reardon finds that the gap between rich and poor children’s math and reading achievement scores is now much larger than it was fifty years ago. And such income-based gaps persist across the school years, as Martha Bailey and Sue Dynarski document in their chapter on the growing income-based gap in college completion. Whither Opportunity? also reveals the profound impact of environmental factors on children’s educational progress and schools’ functioning. Elizabeth Ananat, Anna Gassman-Pines, and Christina Gibson-Davis show that local job losses such as those caused by plant closings can lower the test scores of students with low socioeconomic status, even students whose parents have not lost their jobs. They find that community-wide stress is most likely the culprit. Analyzing the math achievement of elementary school children, Stephen Raudenbush, Marshall Jean, and Emily Art find that students learn less if they attend schools with high student turnover during the school year – a common occurrence in poor schools. And David Kirk and Robert Sampson show that teacher commitment, parental involvement, and student achievement in schools in high-crime neighborhoods all tend to be low. For generations of Americans, public education provided the springboard to upward mobility. This pioneering volume casts a stark light on the ways rising inequality may now be compromising schools’ functioning, and with it the promise of equal opportunity in America.