Combining theoretical approaches with practical applications, Rethinking Social Capital delineates the meaning, uses, and problems surrounding the concept of social capital. Carl Bankston, a leading scholar in the field, offers a fresh take on the topic, presenting an original way of understanding social capital as a process. The book provides key definitions of social capital, describing its functionality, the surrounding theoretical issues, and its relationship with social structure. Examining capital in its various forms, Bankston discusses the complications of defining social relationships in a financial resource analogy as investments in future outcomes, and proposes an alternative of an original structural model that approaches social capital as a process. Chapters then explore the major applications of social capital theory: to families, communities and education; to formal organizations and informal networks; to class, race, ethnicity and inequality; and to the nation-state. This cutting-edge book is invaluable in clarifying ambiguities surrounding the concept of social capital to students and scholars of the social sciences. Its practical applications will also prove useful to policy makers and public policy institutes.

Caldas and Bankston provide a critical, dispassionate analysis of why desegregation in the United States has failed to achieve the goal of providing equal educational opportunities for all students. They offer case histories through dozens of examples of failed desegregation plans from all over the country. The book takes a very broad perspective on race and education, situated in the larger context of the development of individual rights in Western civiliztion. The book traces the long legal history of first racial segregation, and then racial desegregation in America. The authors explain how rapidly changing demographics and family structure in the United States have greatly complicated the project of top-down government efforts to achieve an ideal racial balance in schools. It describes how social capital—a positive outcome of social interaction between and among parents, children, and teachers—creates strong bonds that lead to high academic achievement. The authors show how coercive desegregation weakens bonds and hurts not only students and schools, but also entire communities. Examples from all parts of the United States show how parents undermined desegregation plans by seeking better educational alternatives for their children rather than supporting the public schools to which their children were assigned. Most important, this book offers an alternative, more realistic viewpoint on class, race, and education in America.

After over half a century of court-directed efforts to redress the historical educational chasm between blacks and whites in the United States, both the past achievements and the future direction of school desegregation are uncertain. Too often, the early gains made in racially desegregating America's schools seem to have been halted, and in many cases reversed. Urban school decay is once again on the rise, with predictable consequences. For the very poorest minority students, who have limited educational options apart from dangerous, deteriorating neighbourhood schools, drop-out rates are high, standardised test scores are abysmally low, and violence is an everyday fact of life. The gulf between the unskilled, marginalised students being warehoused in these predominantly poor, minority schools on the one hand, and the increasingly high tech society they cannot compete in on the other, is growing. This ground-breaking book presents the viewpoints and research of some of the most prominent scholars in the field of school desegregation. It covers virtually the entire spectrum of thinking and scholarship on school desegregation and its promise, success, necessity, pitfalls and failures.