Book Review
Reviewed by Naomi Thiers
Hope and Despair in the American City:
Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh
by Gerald Grant
My brother, a political scientist, informs me of a debate in his field: Many political scientists insist that “policy
follows culture,” meaning people establish laws
and social arrangements based on their cultural
values. Others believe that “culture follows
policy,” meaning official policies transform both
how a particular group of people views the
world and the group’s values and traditions.
I thought of this debate as I read Hope and
Despair in the American City. The book presents
a convincing analysis of why school integration
policies limited to city boundaries do little to
lift the prospects of poor urban blacks. Only
policies such as the one carried out in Raleigh,
North Carolina, which purposely merge city and
suburban school districts, adequately improve
education for poor kids. Grant’s narrative—
describing how different approaches in Syracuse,
New York, and Raleigh led to not only dramatically different public school landscapes but also
different community belief systems—lends
support to the “culture follows policy” crowd.
There’s an ironic timeliness to the publication
of this book. Raleigh’s decades-old “economic
desegregation” system, which Grant describes
glowingly, is now in danger of being dismantled.
Opponents of economic desegregation gained
a majority on Raleigh’s Wake County School
Board in an election last fall. In February,
Superintendent Del Burns abruptly resigned,
many believe in protest of the new board majority’s intention to reverse the county’s economic
desegregation. This reversal would be quite a
loss, if Grant’s portrayal of Wake County schools
is accurate. The county has across-the-board
high test scores and has significantly shrunk the
black-white achievement gap.
Grant’s chapters on Raleigh take the reader
inside the decision-making process that led to
stellar classrooms in all parts of Raleigh. He
also takes us inside some of those classrooms to
show how Raleigh’s teachers learned to make
instruction more engaging and inclusive.
In 1976, Raleigh voluntarily merged its city
and county schools. Throughout the 1980s,
Superintendent Walter Marks aggressively made
sure that district schools stayed integrated both
racially and socioeconomically. Marks turned
27 city schools into lavishly resourced magnets
that would attract suburban families, and he
expanded two-way busing. Parents did seek out
these magnets, but the county also committed to
reassigning kids as needed to maintain a healthy
balance of rich and poor in every classroom. To
a great extent, parents could choose their child’s
school, but if any school approached more than
40 percent low-income students, the district
would assign and bus some suburban students
into city schools and vice versa.
This policy, Grant writes, “guaranteed that
all schools in Wake County would have a core
of middle class students who would establish a
floor of positive expectations and create student
networks across class lines” (pp. 105–106).
Thus, the school experience brought new kinds
of social capital to impoverished kids—and
the presence of parents with clout ensured that
neither the teaching nor the facilities in city
schools would slide toward substandard.
Grant contrasts Wake County’s approach with
the way integration was engineered in Syracuse.
Syracuse made schools within city limits as
racially balanced as possible, but left the predominantly white outer ring of suburban districts
untouched. The results were disastrous—as both
test scores and Grant’s own experience raising
his family in an urban Syracuse neighborhood
indicate. In the 1970s and 1980s, city neighborhoods deteriorated in infrastructure and social
stability. Whites fled, but zoning and banking
policies closed off suburban options to most nonwhite families. “The result of these policies,” Grant
laments, “was to create an invisible wall between
