One of our greatest challenges is to successfully educate minority children. These learners usually encounter difficulty in school because the culture of their home is substantially different from the culture of their school. This regrettable mismatch is sometimes called the theory of cultural discontinuity (Au, 1993), and it may be demonstrated in the way teachers interact with children and ask them to do classroom work (Diller, 1999). Such a perspective suggests that when family and school cultures are different - and might even clash - students' at-risk situation is exacerbated because they do not have the types of experiences that the school expects for success. Students, however, are not inherently at risk of failure; rather, they are entangled in an at-risk context (Levin, 1992; Sanacore, 1994; Sanacore & Wilsusen, 1995). As caring educators, what can we do to promote quality instruction that prevents, or at least lessens, the incidence of school failure in minority children?
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Joseph Sanacore (2000) studied this question.