Amazon.com description: Product Description: Making the Difference draws on a detailed study of the schools and homes of the powerful and the wealthy, and the ordinary wage-earner. It allows children, parents and teachers to speak for themselves and from what they say it develops strikingly new ways of understanding 'educational inequality', how the class and gender systems work, and schools and their social roles. 'Equality of opportunity', co-education, and 'relevant and meaningful curriculum' are all questioned, sympathetically but incisively. Ranging across educational policy from system level to the everyday experience of kids and teachers, from the problems of schooling to the production of class and gender relations, Making the Difference is a path-breaking combination of theory, research and politics. Lucid and controversial, it will have a powerful impact on a wide readership. 'This is certainly the most interesting book written about Australian schools in a very long time; it is arguably the most important.' James Blackburn, The Australian Teacher 'The authors of this book are to be congratulated on a number of counts. Perhaps most remarkable, they have produc