Stanford University Press Blog

Myth-Busting the Achievement Gap

A sociologist dispels misconceptions about race and educational disparities.

CC-BY-2.0 via Wikipedia.

A number of assumptions swirl around the educational achievement gap between minority and non-minority students, assumptions that have ossified into what counts as conventional wisdom on the topic. When L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy began researching these educational disparities and the attendant social issues, he was interested in dispelling two persistent myths: first, that the achievement gap is a predominantly urban phenomenon; and second, that class, rather than race, is the decisive factor that holds particular groups of students back.

That Lewis-McCoy elected to locate his research in a suburban context will surprise those well-versed in achievement gap research, much of which is oriented toward urban spaces like Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Much less understood is how these disparities affect suburban schools, despite the increasing diversity of suburban neighborhoods. “It’s almost like there is a neat and discrete disconnect from the idea of people of color and suburban spaces,” says Lewis-McCoy.

The Mother of Invention

Do the pecuniary gains of intellectual property motivate innovation?

 

Incentivizing the “progress of science and the useful arts” has been the goal of intellectual property law since our constitutional beginnings, but artists, scientists, businesses, and the lawyers who serve them continue to debate the merits of IP law and to what extent it stimulates or stymies innovation and creativity. In her new book, Jessica Silbey, Professor of Law at Suffolk University, combs through hundreds of hours worth of interviews with creators, employers, and IP lawyers, to examine whether the statutes are serving their intended purpose. 

The following is an adapted excerpt from Jessica Silbey’s new book, The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property.

Our Spring Catalog (As Told By A Matrix)

A quick visual guide to help you navigate our Spring 2015 offerings.

Spring 2015 is here, bringing with it dozens of new releases on wide-ranging topics, in myriad forms—including a novel that's launching a brand new imprint, a genre-bending book on Walter Benjamin, and a memoir of Armenian genocide. Seasoned web surfers can peruse all of our 2015 titles (including new paperbacks) online, but for a cliff notes version of the catalog, check out the Spring 2015 Matrix:

 

See all Spring 2015 titles »

New Year, New Website

Welcome to the new digs.

SUP's new website offers easy mobile browsing, among other new features.

Streamlined for browsing, optimized for mobile, and featuring a sleek new look, it is with unbridled excitement that we unveil our new website (take a look »). Over a year in the making, this redesign marks the first major overhaul of sup.org in ten years. Our site—which first debuted during the Mosaic era of the Internet—received its first proper redesign in 2005, and has throughout its decade-long tenure, remained more or less the spitting image of its 2005-self.

Needless to say, the past ten years have brought with them a legion of dramatic changes to the online ecosystem, not to mention evolutions in web style and graphic design. So, in 2013 we began reimagining our website. At the nuts and bolts level, we wanted a more robust site with new features that better served our users; aesthetically, we wanted to give the site a modern gloss and make navigation more intuitive and enjoyable.

Why Dr. King Opposed the Atomic Bomb

On the intersections of civil rights, anticolonialism, and nuclear disarmament.

by VINCENT J. INTONDI

Dr. King with President Lyndon Johnson in 1966. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

On February 6, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped up to the pulpit to warn against the use of nuclear weapons. Addressing the second mobilization of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, King urged an end to the war, and warned that if the United States used nuclear weapons in Vietnam the earth would be transformed into an inferno that “even the mind of Dante could not envision.” Then, as he had done so many times before, King made clear the connection between the black freedom struggle in America and the need for nuclear disarmament:

These two issues are tied together in many, many ways. It is a wonderful thing to work to integrate lunch counters, public accommodations, and schools. But it would be rather absurd to work to get schools and lunch counters integrated and not be concerned with the survival of a world in which to integrate.