How we provide equal educational opportunity to an increasingly
diverse, highly urbanized student population is one of the central
concerns facing our nation. As Genevieve Siegel-Hawley argues
in this thought-provoking book, within our metropolitan areas we
are currently allowing a labyrinthine system of school-district
boundaries to divide students--and opportunities--along racial and
economic lines. Rather than confronting these realities,
though, most contemporary educational policies focus on improving
schools by raising academic standards, holding teachers and
students accountable through test performance, and promoting
private-sector competition. Siegel-Hawley takes us into the heart
of the metropolitan South to explore what happens when communities
instead focus squarely on overcoming the educational divide between
city and suburb.
Based on evidence from metropolitan school desegregation efforts in
Richmond, Virginia; Louisville, Kentucky; Charlotte-Mecklenburg,
North Carolina; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, between 1990 and 2010,
Siegel-Hawley uses quantitative methods and innovative mapping
tools both to underscore the damages wrought by school-district
boundary lines and to raise awareness about communities that have
sought to counteract them. She shows that city-suburban school
desegregation policy is related to clear, measurable progress on
both school and housing desegregation. Revisiting educational
policies that in many cases were abruptly halted--or never
begun--this book will spur an open conversation about the creation
of the healthy, integrated schools and communities critical to our
multiracial future.