This chapter combines insights from across the three literatures that inform the book’s central thesis to demonstrate how these disciplines speak to one another in ways that amount to a novel approach for resolving the knowing–doing gap introduced in the book’s Introduction. In marrying these interdisciplinary perspectives, the chapter concludes with recommendations for resolving lingering questions about how Model O-I and Model O-II systems in K-16 school contexts serving students from low-income and other minoritized cultural communities are established, maintained, or precluded altogether.

This chapter reviews information about the demographic and democratic imperatives prompting K-16 educators to reconsider what they do not know about their students’ cultural backgrounds in urban schools and minority serving institutions (MSIs). It highlights the connection between the student–teacher racial mismatch characterizing K-16 contexts in the United States and a coexistent cultural mismatch. It makes an argument that these demographic characteristics present a human capital challenge that ultimately diminishes teacher effectiveness at learning across cultural differences between themselves and their students in urban schools and MSIs. It concludes by modeling this human capital challenge as a knowing–doing gap using a framework from the organizational literature.