Comparative studies of education, discrimination, and poverty in cross-cultural context are held as contributing towards a better understanding of the social nature of poverty and the complex processes of cultural transmission, continuity, and change. Seven strategies or models of research are suggested: (1) study of secondary and tertiary socialization in schools; (2) inquiry into the relationship of minority group language and conceptual styles to learning; (3) consideration of education's relationship to needs of the adolescent in societal initiation and personal identity; (4) study of patterns of minority group interaction with school; (5) systematic description of options and requirements for diversity offered through the schools, such as counseling, discipline, vocational-academic curricula, and bilingual and bicultural schooling; and, (7) study of education as a social problem, i.e. how the school fails, instead of how students fail. (KG)