How do our schools take bright, active, ordinary children, who happen to be poor and black, and turn them into ill-educated and violent delinquents? Lois Stalvey’s book will show you how it is done. In 1962, the Stalveys, a middle-class white family, moved from Omaha to an integrated urban neighborhood in Philadelphia, where the three children enrolled in public schools. For twelve years, Lois Stalvey watched her children and their predominantly African American classmates as both a parent and a volunteer teacher. What she saw was shocking. When her own children misbehaved or had learning problems, they were granted patience and understanding. In contrast, African American children were treated, by both black and white teachers, as naughty, dangerous, obstinate, or stupid. Though more than twenty years have passed since the first publication of this book, the tragedy is that the message Lois Stalvey shares with her readers can only be more important today. “Why bother moving children’s bodies around to achieve integrated education,” she asks, “if, like the children in our school, they cannot escape teachers with segregating eyes?”

Lois Mark Stalvey is the author of The Education of a WASP, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and The Education of An Ordinary Woman. Now a resident of Sedona, Arizona, she has been a contributor to Reader’s Digest, Woman’s Day, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, and other magazines and newspapers.