Transforming America: Cultural Cohesion, Educational Achievement, and Global Competitiveness by Robert A. DeVillar Binbin Jiang (review)

Abstract

Transforming America: Cultural Cohesion. Educational Achievement, and Global Competitiveness, by Robert A. DeVillar and Binbin Jiang. New York: Peter Lang, 2011, 336 pp., $36.95, paperback.Much has been written and said about educational reform for a global competitiveness in recent years. Even more has been written and said about racism and equity in education. Seldom are these two bodies of scholarly discourse brought together. Even more rarely are they joined in a way that synthesizes the best of the two. Transforming America: Cultural Cohesion, Educational Achievement, and Global Competitiveness is such a book. Moreover, it is very well written.Robert DeVillar and Binbin Jiang, the authors of this book, make a scholarly and wellresearched case for a new approach to achieving global competitiveness. This is done through eradicating racism and ensuring equity in quality schooling. The authors contend that unless the exclusion from quality learning of marginalized students stop, America will not be able to compete and lead at a global level. This central argument of the book is well supported by the depth and comprehensiveness of historical research and cotemporary data from multiple disciplines. Furthermore, the authors do an excellent job of organizing the chapters so that readers can see intricate connections between realities of racism, education, economy, and globalization that hold answers to real global competitiveness of America.In Chapter 1, the authors provide a salient illustration of the critical challenges America faces today: the erosion of national prosperity and global competitiveness. For those who still believe in the permanency of Pax Americana along with the presumption of America as the epitome of freedom, democracy and wealth, this chapter is more than disorienting. The authors reveal where America stands within what Fareed Zakaria (2011) arguably terms, "the post American world," in less than flattering ways such as "our broken economic situation", "eroding US competitive edge" "our nation is not rising to the challenge of international competition academically, economically, and geopolitically". Then, the authors carefully walk readers through to discover the historical origins of current problems in Chapter 2: the racism and White privilege from the inception of the nation onwards. Readers are presented with a rigorous historical account of how America has maintained the privileged status of Whites up until today. Chapters 3 and 4 reveal a more disturbing history of how racism has been constructed and disseminated by academia and popular media, and further reinforced and sustained by government.In the nation's long history of racism and exclusion, marginalized groups were not powerless victims; rather, they were the ones who have challenged the racist nation to live up to its founding rhetoric, liberty and justice for all, which is thoroughly documented in Chapters 5 through 7. Particular attention is paid to the continued struggles and achievements by African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans in their quest for substantive social and educational equity. America is, however, nowhere near the promise of its founding rhetoric, which is discussed in Chapter 8 with focus on school resegregation, widening achievement gaps along racial lines, which have led to a domestically fragmented and globally declining nation. …