Educational Leadership

cities and suburbs. On one side of the wall were greater and greater concentrations of the poor and minorities—those with the greatest needs and a smaller tax base to provide resources” (p. 136).

The power of Grant’s chapters on Syracuse stems from his personal connection and his storytelling skill. Grant, who is white, grew up in Syracuse and moved his family back in the 1970s. His children attended city schools, and he taught at a Syracuse high school for two years. He saw firsthand why busing low-income minority kids into formerly all-white city schools didn’t significantly change prospects for these students. Teachers were unprepared to instruct a diverse group, minority kids were disproportionately placed into “a dead-end track of diluted classwork” (p. 51), and racial tensions turned violent. The situation stabilized in the 1980s, but then urban poverty deepened and the middle class continued to flee. Schools and student achievement deteriorated.

Syracuse was typical of how
northern cities handled integration, as
Grant details in the chapter “A Tragic
Decision.” Such cities often poured
money into improving city schools with
little result, because they didn’t prior-
itize breaking down walls between city
and suburb. The “tragic decision” Grant
refers to is a 1974 Supreme Court ruling
striking down a Detroit desegregation
plan that would have merged urban
and suburban districts. Lower courts
had consistently found that such factors
as school site selection and attendance
zones created de facto segregation and
had upheld the need for aggressive mea-
sures to dissolve that segregation.

He mentions other cities—Charlotte, Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Louisville—that have implemented socioeconomic desegregation. And to promote socioeconomic diversity nationwide, he suggests offering children in the worst urban schools vouchers to “buy themselves a seat” in a better, suburban school. Grant notes that pushing for diversity in public schools is about more than closing achievement gaps: “The goal is to provide more opportunities for people to freely associate across racial, ethnic, and economic lines” (p. 184). If education policy can drive the culture we create among our citizens, we should look carefully at the fruit of our policies. EL

Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh was published by Harvard University Press in 2009; $25.95, hardcover.