The conflict of cultures in the classroom is the urgent educational issue to which this paper is addressed. School cultures are sub-sets of the culture of organized institutions in which they are formed. In our ethnically pluralistic society the school run and staffed by white middle class educators (as most are) fails to make a cultural match with the communities in which they operate. Misunderstanding of the resulting conflict led to such ethnocentric and culturally chauvinistic explanations as the "cultural deprivation" of blacks and Puerto Ricans. Though we claim to have moved beyond this point of misunderstanding now, we have yet to solve the problem of the child who must not only learn to read and write a different language or dialect than he hears and speaks outside the school, but must also do so through situations and procedures that are culturally foreign to his experience. There is a need for commitment to research and practice with a cultural perspective, a perspective which suggests that the school culture is a second culture to be added to a child's repertoire, rather than a replacement for the ethnic group culture already existing. (MH)