Discusses three concerns about inequities in public education: the national movement to write off poor urban students (and growing pressure to privatize public schooling), the sense of hopelessness in the literature on public education, and the lack of action in creating educational change and improvement. (SM)

Reviews an ethnographic analysis of Teach for America, a 1990 educational reform program that illustrates how underlying assumptions about "marginal" urban and rural students and their "deficient" environments solidify existing power structures, acculturate students to middle-class norms, generate resistance to teachers, and…