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Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Historical Studies of Urban America) Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition
Taking Nashville as her focus, Erickson uncovers the hidden policy choices that have until now been missing from popular and legal narratives of inequality. In her account, inequality emerges not only from individual racism and white communities’ resistance to desegregation, but as the result of long-standing linkages between schooling, property markets, labor markets, and the pursuit of economic growth. By making visible the full scope of the forces invested in and reinforcing inequality, Erickson reveals the complex history of, and broad culpability for, ongoing struggles in our schools.
- ISBN-13978-0226025254
- EditionReprint
- PublisherThe University of Chicago Press
- Publication dateApril 1, 2016
- LanguageEnglish
- File size5303 KB
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Editorial Reviews
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“Drawing on extensive archival research and over fifty original oral histories, Making the Unequal Metropolis is a deeply researched and analytically sophisticated book that builds on the work of historians of education, politics, and civil rights. . . . It is an important and timely book. Over six decades after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Erickson’s study provides new ways of thinking, talking, and teaching about the history and legacies of school segregation in the United States.” ― Journal of Southern History
“Erickson argues persuasively that schools are significant markers of valued resources (land, high-quality housing and other properties, safety, family-oriented neighborhoods) and serve as proxies for those who possess such resources. . . . She reminds concerned readers, particularly educators and policy-makers, that curative policies and interventions absent an understanding of educational inequality’s historical foundations in slavery and racism are bound only to reinforce current disparities. Additionally, Erickson reveals that attempts at educational equality that are decoupled from integrated fair housing and urban renewal projects will only remake inequality.” ― Journal of Children and Poverty
“Making the Unequal Metropolis achieves that rare balance of deep archival engagement and immediate contemporary relevance. Through this impressive account of postwar Nashville, Erickson makes compelling connections between institutional expressions of white power and the use of schools to preserve the educational, residential, and economic advantages of white people. In their location, curricula, and apparent social benefits, schools helped those in power selectively encourage economic investment and divide the haves from the have-nots. Even well-meaning reforms meant to ensure growth or desegregation could advance new forms of white power and privilege if schools remained under the control of those more concerned with order than justice. Segregation, we learn yet again, is no accident, inequality no forgone conclusion. But unlike other authors, Erickson issues a powerful and useful charge for understanding and undoing both: pay attention to our schools.” ― N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete
“This powerful history of four decades of school desegregation in Nashville demonstrates how federal and municipal policies consistently reproduced racial inequality across the metropolitan landscape and inside the classrooms of one of the nation’s most successful ‘statistically desegregated’ districts during the era of court-ordered busing. In Erickson’s sobering assessment, Nashville’s white leadership and educational system always favored economic growth over racial equality, white suburbs over urban neighborhoods, and market logics over democracy and full citizenship.” -- Matthew Lassiter ― author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South
“Erickson’s detailed analysis makes these processes explicit and sets her work apart from conventional legal and historical accounts of desegregation in other key ways. First, her meticulous analysis spans more than fifty years of segregation and desegregation. Second, Erickson’s work stands out in its approach to understanding government culpability as a problem of political economy. She critiques de facto segregation narratives for masking state involvement, and demonstrates ways that state power operated across levels of government to maintain educational inequality. The book combines an expansive chronological scope with a political economy approach, and as a result provides countless examples of city planners, real estate developers, business leaders, and municipal officials making everyday decisions that ultimately perpetuated educational inequalities.” ― Historical Studies in Education
“This revealing book is important for its resonant history of school desegregation, for its spatial imagination, for its account of the modern South, and for the bright light it shines on crucial mechanisms of inequality. Researched at depth and written with felicity, Making the Unequal Metropolis sharpens understanding as it explores fundamental fault lines in the American experience.” ― Ira I. Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
“Can our schools make us equal? As Erickson reminds us, this ever-present question ignores the historic role of public schools in creating and reinforcing the same disparities that the schools are now called upon to correct. Even as courts ordered racial desegregation, decisions about where to locate schools—and what to teach in them—structured new inequalities across the American urban landscape. Nobody has done more to illuminate these hidden decisions and deceptions than Erickson. And nobody can understand our current educational impasse without reading her meticulous and inspired book.” ― Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University
"Wherever this historiography moves next, scholars will do well to engage with the work of [Erickson]...[Making the Unequal Metropolis] deserves a thorough read to better understand how American society became so unequal during the twentieth century and, possibly, to deal with how to unmake the ‘hundreds of small choices’ (p. 4)." ― History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society
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Product details
- ASIN : B01D61B652
- Publisher : The University of Chicago Press; Reprint edition (April 1, 2016)
- Publication date : April 1, 2016
- Language : English
- File size : 5303 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 416 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,144,156 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #788 in Education History
- #1,182 in Discrimination & Racism Studies
- #1,506 in African American Studies
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How do we understand schools? Do we understand them as separate institutions divorced from their surroundings? And most relevantly for this book, do we examine educational inequality -- historically and contemporarily -- as being caused only by discrimination, racism, and/or singular policy decisions? We know that schools cannot be separated from their communities, and Erickson helps us understand that the roots of educational inequality are very deeply enmeshed not just due to (very real, significant, and wide-ranging) discrimination and racial resistance, but economic, social, and political issues in cities. Many books have sought to understand the reasons for continued educational inequality, but few have done so in ways that Erickson has that speaks to the complexity and interrelatedness of schools with every sector of the cities in which they sit.
For example, her novel use of space and spatial analysis in terms of how Nashville was purposely "drawn" up in terms of city planning and organizational design to encourage segregation -- and then maintain it in later decades following court orders -- is important in understanding not just segregated schools, but educational inequality writ large. In some respects, she uses Nashville as a proxy for cities all across the U.S.; while Nashville certainly possesses unique qualities (one of them, as Erickson optimistically and notably shows, was how it was an outlier in terms of successfully integrating schools for a finite period of time), Nashville's struggle for educational equity parallels the struggles of most other U.S. cities.
For a book that that is so thoroughly researched and so robust in its analysis, it is beautifully written. Erickson does a remarkable job taking the reader on a rich, if not ultimately troubling, journey to understand the structural inequalities and often hidden policy decisions that prevented lasting desegregation and a continuation of a brief period of a narrowing of the Black-white achievement gap in Nashville. Partly responsible for Erickson's captivating prose is her use of oral histories; alongside her insightful historical analysis and exhaustive archival (and public record) research, she intertwines copious oral histories of people who experienced busing and education from a variety of perspectives. These oral histories add a humanizing layer and important texture to this impressively researched book, and I enjoyed how these touching human stories were interwoven within her analysis. As someone who experienced busing all throughout K-12 education in one of the nation's largest desegregation programs, reading Erickson's book brought back many memories -- and forced me to engage (and reassess) my memories abut busing, and most importantly, how busing was only one, albeit major, mechanism (both successfully and unsuccessfully utilized) within the larger relationship between cities and their schools.
Overall, to truly understand educational inequality today, we must take a long historical look at why it remains so entrenched in American society. Erickson's book takes us one step closer to doing that, and I highly recommend her book for anyone who was a student of the busing era, interested in the history of American cities, and above all, like myself, anyone who is an advocate for educational equity and interested in reversing decades of inequalities for the sake of our children.