Customer Reviews

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

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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.