Rosenfeld's Perspective on American Schools According to Jerry Rosenfeld, American schools are failing minority students at widespread proportions. In his ethnographic book “Shut Those Thick Lips!” (1971), African American students arrive at a Harlem school with deficient basic skills, resulting in suboptimal academic achievement. The predominantly white teaching staff accepts these deficiencies as a consequence of “cultural poverty,” whereby the minority culture itself is deficient and deficient for successful integration into the larger society. Viewing the culture as impoverished, teachers shift the responsibility for this common failure of minorities directly onto students. Rosenfeld counters this “geography of guilt” by sharing his personal experiences within the Harlem community. After spending time with the students outside of school, he discovers firsthand that the children are neither uneducated nor disadvantaged. Teachers' common “beliefs” about students (e.g., indifferent or uninvolved parents, lack of interest in learning, lazy and unclean, etc.) are based on unfounded myths used “to reduce them all to one common definition.” of what it means to be a marginalized black member of society (Rosenfeld, 1971, p. 50). Therefore, if schools were agents of cultural transmission capable of producing broader social expectations, a deficit and reductionist approach would likely succeed in keeping people academically and (possibly) economically disadvantaged. Ultimately, Rosenfeld's perspectives on education are limited to personal experiences in only one context. of many schools – in a single community – encapsulated in an American historical context of widespread racial tensions. Such a narrow view begs the question… at the heart of the card… instruction in phonics, spelling, and vocabulary. Upper Saddle River, NJ:Merrill.Ganske, K. (2000). Word Journeys: Assessment-driven phonics, spelling, and vocabulary instruction. New York: The Guilford Press. Ganske, K. (2006). Word sorts and more. New York: The Guilford Press. Johnston, F., Bear, D., & Invernizzi, M. (2004). Their Way: Word Sorting for Alphabetical Spellings of Letter Names. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.Leslie, L., Allen, L. (1999). Factors predicting success in an early literacy intervention project. Reading Research Quarterly, 34, 404-424.Pressley, M. (2006). Reading instruction that works: The case for balanced teaching (3rd ed.). New York: The Guilford Press. Walpole, S. & McKenna, M. (2004). The literacy coach's manual: A research-based guide to practice. New York: The Guilford Press.