Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (Positions: Education, Politics, and Culture) [Paperback]

Paul Street (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 041595116X | ISBN-13: 978-0415951166 | Publication Date: September 1, 2005 | Edition: New edition

Fifty years after the US Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" was "inherently unequal," Paul Street argues that little progress has been made to meaningful reform America's schools. In fact, Street considers the racial make-up of today's schools as a state of de facto apartheid. With an eye to historical development of segregated education, Street examines the current state of school funding and investigates disparities in teacher quality, teacher stability, curriculum, classroom supplies, faculties, student-teacher ratios, teacher' expectations for students and students' expectations for themselves. Books in the series offer short, polemic takes on hot topics in education, providing a basic entry point into contemporary issues for courses and general; readers.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Segregated Schools is one of the best accounts we have, not only of the shameless legacy and effects of racism in our nation's schools, but also of the underlying structural and ideological conditions that make it possible. Every student, teacher, parent, citizen, and all those concerned about racial and class segregation, as well as the fate of democracy in the 21st century, should read this book.
–Henry Giroux Global Television Network Chair in Communication Studies and English, McMaster University

Paul Street sounds the alarm: America's commitment to racial integration in public education is dead. This stunning acknowledgment coming more than 50 years after the historic Brown decision represents a major reversal in America's journey toward racial equality. Street helps us to understand how and why this reversal has occurred and what the implications are for allowing the poorest and most disadvantaged students to be concentrated in the worst schools with the least funding. Street's book is a sobering wake-up call.
–Pedro Noguera Professor, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University

About the Author

Paul Street served as Vice President for Research and Planning at the Chicago Urban League from 2000 to 2005 and is a Visiting Professor of History at Northern Illinois University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; New edition edition (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 041595116X
• ISBN-13: 978-0415951166
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,642,649 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Much Better Stuff Out There on This Issue, November 3, 2009

By 

AmericanDreamer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (Positions: Education, Politics, and Culture) (Paperback)

As someone who has read a lot on the topics of inequities in educational opportunity and segregation by class and race in our schools, I don't think this book, written by a former Chicago Urban League official, contributed much useful to the literature. It is written primarily from a sociological point of view which, while it offers some useful insights, represents ground covered often elsewhere and more effectively. (For pathbreaking sociological analysis of educational opportunity, James Coleman's 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity report has not been topped; William Julius Wilson has also done outstanding work on opportunity structures writing from this tradition). Jonathan Kozol, writing from primarily a journalistic point of view in Savage Inequalities, covered similar ground in an emotionally and humanly compelling way.

Street's analysis is unenlightening and at times sloppy, often and inexcusably, for example, conflating references to social class and race-based inequities. The secondary sources cited are relatively few, narrow, and generally weak, with few primary sources or original research. Street ends up undeclared on whether school integration is on balance a good idea, supports funding equity as necessary but not sufficient to achieve equality of educational opportunity, and is tepidly supportive of reducing residential segregation without proposing means to do that. He strikes this reader as generally stuck in a 1960s time warp rhetorically (the US war in Vietnam, which for reader reference I believe was a mistake, was "racist" and "neocolonial" in his view, assertions likely to alienate some readers who might otherwise be more open to his thinking and arguments; "capitalism" is castigated as if it were a single phenomenon taking identical form everywhere).

If you want to read well-argued and sourced cases for school integration that come to terms with the experiences of earlier decades, read Richard Kahlenberg's All Together Now or Gerald Grant's Hope and Despair in the American City. If you want the latest and best research on where the US stands on school segregation today, and why it matters, check out the work of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Ron Suskind's A Hope in the Unseen gives life and human texture to the sociological abstractions in powerfully portraying the experience of an African American boy growing up in a highly segregated southeast Washington, DC neighborhood. Amy Stuart Wells' personal retrospective Both Sides Now, on her experiences attending racially integrated schools in the St. Louis area, is insightful and well worth reading, as is all of her work that I have come across. Common Ground, by the late J. Anthony Lukas on the Boston busing experience in the 1970s, is masterful as a starting point for assessing the more recent US historical experience with efforts to reduce racial school segregation. Susan Eaton's The Children in Room E4 overlaps in purpose and scope with most of the above-cited sources.