Events & Calendars Amherst College Education Studies Initiative: "Equality and Educational Opportunity" Talk by Sean Reardon

The Amherst College Education Studies Initiative is pleased to announce an annual interdisciplinary speaker series on education and inequality. Please join us for our inaugural event with Sean Reardon, discussing "Equality and Educational Opportunity: The American Dream of the American Fantasy."

Reardon is a professor of poverty and inequality in education, professor (by courtesy) of sociology and director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Training Program in Quantitative Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University. His research focuses on the causes, patterns, trends and consequences of social and educational inequality, and the effects of educational policy on educational and social inequality. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a recipient of the William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award, the National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

This talk will discuss how the “American Dream” promises everyone in America equal educational and economic opportunity, and how education is widely imagined to be the pathway to economic opportunity. But some argue that our schools, rather than serving as engines of equal opportunity, are instead agents of inequality. In this talk, Reardon will describe the landscape of educational opportunity in America, with a particular focus on how opportunity is distributed by race, ethnicity and social class, and the roles that our schools play-- and might play --in making the American Dream a reality.

This event is sponsored by Amherst College Education Professions and the Departments of American Studies, History and English.