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This chapter explores the Advanced Placement (AP) program in suburban school districts. Even as urban centers like Fort Worth and New York typify today's livelier venues for AP expansion, the program has deep roots in the prosperous suburbs that abut them. Along with elite private schools, upscale suburban high schools were among the program's earliest adopters, and they remain natural habitats for a nationally benchmarked, high-status venture that gives strong students a head start on the college education that they are almost certainly going to get and perhaps an extra advantage in gaining admission to the universities they aspire to. Yet they are also ripe for attention as they struggle with equity and growth issues of their own. The chapter then reviews two well-known yet very different suburban districts: Dublin City Schools in Ohio and Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. Both are celebrated as education successes in their states and both boast long and impressive AP track records. Both, however, face distinctive challenges as they seek to serve today's constituents. Their stories illustrate how AP is functioning in places that know it well yet continue to evolve with it.

Using primary and secondary sources like newspaper articles, school board minutes, policy reports, interviews and books, this chapter outlines key school desegregation characteristics of Richmond, Louisville, Charlotte and Chattanooga. The differing school district boundary line arrangements are emphasized alongside a discussion of how those configurations developed. The chapter also explores how similar early school desegregation histories in each of the metros gave way to very different approaches in later years. Major policy shifts are highlighted, and an overview of limited efforts in two of the metros to address housing segregation in conjunction with school segregation is provided.

This chapter links the differing city-suburban school district configurations and desegregation histories of Richmond, Charlotte, Louisville and Chattanooga to contemporary patterns of school and housing segregation. U.S. Census and federal school enrollment data is used to analyze key trends in housing and schools. Maps constructed using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the visual presentation of different measures of segregation dramatically illustrates the current landscape of school and housing segregation. Most significantly, the chapter shows that metropolitan school desegregation strategies are associated with dramatic declines in both school and housing segregation between 1990 and 2010. The increasingly multiracial nature of school enrollments in the four metros is emphasized, and key policy changes (e.g., the abandonment of school desegregation policies) are linked to increases in levels of school and housing segregation.

This chapter focuses on city schools. City schools in the United States are failing. Evidently, school policy ought to be of central concern for those concerned with cities, since not only do nearly all children attend schools close to home, but in addition, the schools are for the most part governed and funded locally. Unless city schools are repaired, other aspects of city life will continue to slide downhill. This city-school problem, a crucial piece of urban affairs, will not be solved with city resources and city politics alone. The national government and the states need to do better budgeting, improve regulations, and provide open-minded support.

This chapter argues that the public school crisis will continue unless the nation moves dramatically to reduce racial segregation of residential areas and to enact policies to reduce class distinctions. Equity in public schooling—a fair chance for every child—requires these changes. In the absence of actions to reduce the society's disabling racial class differences, an overall national program of school reform is called for, one that uses federal funding for economic stimulus. Such a reform would also radically rethink the nation's overall approach to public schools. Small successful American experiments suggest possibilities for such reform. Two examples stand out: special schools as parts of larger city school systems, and programs that help city children to attend suburban schools.

This chapter considers the simplest explanation for the troubles of inner-city schooling: less money and more needy students. Based on well-known economic and demographic changes during the period after World War II, this explanation posits that school resources declined because the tax base eroded as industry and middle-class families moved out of the city. The schools faced an influx of disadvantaged students because economic conditions deteriorated and impoverished southern black migrants moved into the city, while the more affluent families moved out. If true, this account would still leave one with questions: why, for instance, did the problems of inner-city schooling take the specific form they did? However, at least for Chicago through 1960, trends in school funding and student disadvantage do not match popular conceptions of the postwar period. The chapter examines trends in school resources, relating these to the economic history of the city and to institutional change in the schools.

This chapter follows Chicago's educators and district officials as they explored new approaches, such as ability grouping and social promotion, then settled on a set of policies that would last with little alteration from the late 1930s through the 1960s. As it describes, the schools' approach to remedial education may have been adequate in some schools, but it was an abject failure in inner-city schools. Differences in student achievement were not a new condition in Chicago's public schools. There had always been students who struggled academically. In the nineteenth century, however, most of these children dropped out of school before long. Then, when compulsory education laws became stricter, low-achieving students became more visible, and more troublesome. Beginning in the early twentieth century, Chicago's school administrators went through an elaborate period of trial and error as they developed new strategies for dealing with low-achieving students.

This chapter builds a case for a more nuanced understanding of urban schools and populations, discussing changes in cities and metropolitan regions over the last two decades and the significance of these changes for scholars of urban education. First, it outlines how recent shifts in cities complicate conceptions of the “urban” generally found in the research literature and media. Exploring these changes in relation to education policy, it discusses integration, neoliberalism, and educational reform in a post–civil rights era. The chapter then brings these more macro-level realities to bear on the shifts occurring at Morningside Elementary, the research site. Using the demographic changes at Morningside as an example of changing urban spaces, this chapter highlights the need for understandings of “the urban” to include a focus on gentrification and the contours and consequences of middle-class parent engagement in city schools and neighborhoods.

This chapter illuminates the reciprocal relationship between school and housing segregation. Based largely on the work of noted desegregation scholars, it discusses the theory and research underlying the school-housing link and shows how city-suburban school desegregation policies are far more effective than policies limited to central cities in integrating schools and neighborhoods. It also draws upon a new base of evidence documenting the long-term and extensive relationship between patterns of metropolitan housing development and school construction. With such deeply rooted connections between the two spheres, the chapter acknowledges the latent power in tackling school and housing issues together. Yet despite the increasingly well-acknowledged relationship, many places have relied almost exclusively on school desegregation to begin dismantling American apartheid.

This book, which illuminates the roots of failure in inner-city education, challenges, at its most general level, two fallacies. The first is the view that the failure of inner-city schools was inevitable given the concentration of economic and racial disadvantage in the inner city. The second is the view that the problems of inner-city schools were due to the faults of individuals—incompetent or racist teachers, dysfunctional families, or unmotivated students. In response to both of these fallacies, the book argues that the problems of inner-city schooling are the legacy of school policy choices made decades ago. It also traces these choices and their consequences over six decades, starting in the early twentieth century, when the inner-city ghettos were just beginning to form, and focuses on the schools of Chicago, which faced many of the same troubles as the Harlem schools that Kenneth Clark profiled.

This chapter focuses on the problems of authority and engagement. By the early 1960s, Kenneth Clark wrote, inner-city schools in Chicago were characterized by what teachers framed as problems of discipline, including tension and distrust between teacher and students, resistance to schoolwork, and disruption in the classroom. Not all teachers faced these problems, but by the early 1960s, they were a recurrent theme in observations of inner-city schools, and continue to be so today. The chapter, which enters the classroom, linking reports of discipline problems to the features of urban context and school policy, begins with a few simple observations about classroom life. First, learning is voluntary; it will not happen unless students choose to cooperate with the teacher. In school, learning is a group activity, which brings added challenges.

This book has sought to explain the origins of the troubles of inner-city schooling that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, coinciding with the changing urban conditions of the post-World War II era. These problems cannot be attributed to urban change alone. School policies are a critical part of the explanation. There is no question that inner-city schools were handicapped by resource scarcity. The problems of poor facilities, overcrowding, inexperienced teachers, and double-shift schedules were only too plain. These resource deficits did not result from economic and demographic change, however: after 1945, Chicago's public schools had more money, not less, to spend on education. Instead, these deficits reflect decisions made by school officials about how to allocate funds and students. Students were segregated by race, and fewer resources were allocated to black schools.

This chapter first considers the problems faced by the urban school and establishes the potential for environmental injustice to be compounded by social injustice. It then considers the possibility of moving beyond merely ameliorating these negative effects so that the city school becomes a part of the solution to the challenges of urban living, an environmental and social resource for the whole community. It is argued that this ambition for the city school draws on ideas of justice based on recognition and participation, and therefore moves beyond understandings founded on principles of distributive justice.

Chapter 6 reveals the progressive leadership that Dr. Jim Hinson provides for the Independence School District when he is named superintendent in 2002. He aggressively advances program management efficiency, grantsmanship initiatives and establishes new partnerships with community organizations. He charges Jennifer Walker, director of youth development and education, with restructuring early education and family outreach services to make service delivery more efficient. In an extraordinary year of change, this eliminates administrative "silos" between departments and establishes new procedures to better administer early education and outreach services. Dr. Hinson’s leadership prevails during one of the biggest challenges in District history: the District’s annexation of failing schools in the neighboring Kansas City School District. The litigious, two-year battle engages Missouri politicians, businesses, churches, and thousands of local citizens. This annexation changes the size, scope, and student population of the Independence School District and academic outcomes of thousands of students for the better.

This chapter examines whether parents are able to send a clear message to schools by the act of choosing a school. It discusses the existence of informed consumers, focusing on the level of knowledge parents have that influences their decision in choosing or leaving a school. The chapter examines the following educational options for parents in the Milwaukee area: both aspects of the interdistrict Chapter 220 program (that is, suburban students choosing city schools as well as city students choosing suburban schools); the intradistrict three-choice selection process within Milwaukee public schools; and traditional tuition-based private schooling.

Education bestowed income; it could also bestow status. Its social significance had particular import for both blacks and immigrants in Chicago because of their marginalized position within the city, although it resonated most for black and immigrant elites, who promoted education as a means of group uplift. Yet the response to their message depended on the contours of their respective communities. This chapter argues that the meaning of education turned on contrasts in elites' roles in these communities, in the internal organization of black and immigrant neighborhoods, and in the capacity of these communities to protect their members against white American surveillance and stigmatization. Education took on a different social significance for the black and immigrant working classes. The chapter engages cultural explanations for the rise of inner-city schooling and extends an influential account that links minority orientations to schooling to the group's relation to the dominant society. Over time, according to this account, immigrants were accepted into the mainstream of American society, while African Americans remained excluded.

This chapter presents the history and background of the Canford Program. It also discusses the legal case brought about by several individuals asking for increased integration in local schools and describes the major goals of the settlement agreement. The chapter highlights the implementation of the Canford Voluntary Transfer Program, which allows students to transfer out of the South Bay City School District into Arbor Town.