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This chapter traces how educational models generated by local community-based Black education organizers in previous decades collided with, and contributed to, neoliberal models of school choice, competition, and privatization. By obscuring and appropriating the intentions of a Black self-determinist politics of Black achievement in service of a neoliberal political agenda, corporate education reformers positioned urban education as a new market for private investment and capital accumulation. The chapter situates Chicago’s education reform policies of the 1980s and 1990s within national debates about the utility of the “Effective Schools” model, shifts to mayoral control of schools, and the proliferation of magnet schools and charter schools. As was the case historically, Black Chicagoans did not respond monolithically to neoliberal educational and political models. Black parents of varying class backgrounds flocked to magnet schools and charter schools. Black teachers in traditional public schools questioned the implications of privatization for hard-fought political and professional gains. Meanwhile, new debates emerged over issues of funding equalization, parent and community involvement in schools, accountability measures, and the value of neighborhood schools. This chapter discusses points of historical continuity and discontinuity in the transition from urban education reform models seeking equity to models promoting market-based “school choice.”

In response to a series of polarizing labor organizing drives sponsored by the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s, which culminated in the Flint sit-down strike of 1936-1937, local industrialist Charles Stewart Mott inaugurated a citywide health, recreation, and education program. Under Mott’s leadership, GM executives forged a partnership with the board of education that brought millions of dollars to Flint’s public schools. On the strength of that partnership, the Flint Public Schools pioneered a system of “community education” that hundreds of cities copied during the postwar period. Mott and his chief lieutenant, Frank Manley, envisioned Flint’s community schools as all-purpose civic centers. Open around the clock, Flint’s schools offered hundreds of adult education courses, recreational programs, and health initiatives for youth and adults of all races. However, the Mott program also institutionalized patterns of racial segregation, educational disadvantage, and economic inequality. Foundation officials and members of the board of education repeatedly manipulated school transfer procedures, built new schools in segregated residential areas, and gerrymandered school district boundaries—all in an attempt to maintain policy-driven segregation in local schools and neighborhoods. Consequently, the city’s schools were often even more segregated than the segregated neighborhoods they served.

This chapter focuses on the general assignment policy of the Wake school board. It emphasizes that disagreements about the conflicting cultural models of public education were a leading cause of the breakdown of Wake's consensus. Wake initially assigned students in order to balance schools by race, but as districts across the country came under political and legal pressure to end the practice, the school board utilized socioeconomic status. Supporters argued that the approach was fair, essential to the system's overall academic achievement, made the area attractive to newcomers, and involved the busing of only a small proportion of students for diversity reasons. Advocating the neighborhood model, opponents argued that diversity restricted choice, caused hardship by assigning children far from their homes, undermined collective academic performance, and constituted a form of social engineering. The chapter presents survey results demonstrating that, although inversely correlated according to media coverage, respondent preferences for diversity and neighborhood schools were not diametrically opposed. The findings suggest that neighborhood schools had a high degree of support among many citizens, but a subset was also very supportive of diversity. This chapter also investigates diversity preferences by race and shows that African American views on school assignment policies were very different from whites' views.

This chapter shows how the name of South Boston became synonymous with resistance to school desegregation. Not only did Southie militants make the drab, old high school on Dorchester Heights a symbol of racial strife, but Southie activists carried the war to other neighborhoods, to hated enemy territory in the suburbs, to corridors of power in the state legislature and city hall, and beyond, more persistently and passionately than any other group. To this day, the South Boston Information Center continues the crusade against “forced busing” and for “neighborhood schools.” In his Pulitzer-prizewinning book Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas shifted the spotlight to Charlestown, another tough, working-class, mostly Irish white citadel, to illustrate the social dynamics at work in a fiercely antibusing neighborhood.

Northern schools were no less segregated than their southern counterparts. Rooted in segregated residential patterns attendance areas were organized using a neighborhood concept designed so that small children could walk to school and back home. As a result schools manifested considerable “racial imbalance.” Chapter 2 examines Evanston’s school desegregation plan. In December 1964 the Board of Education voted to gradually end de facto segregation and hired Dr. Gregory C. Coffin to implement its plan. Like other cities in the north Evanston’s strategy called for the redistribution of students from its all-black elementary school to institutions situated in white neighborhoods. Student bodies were more representative, but black children continued to be alienated. Whisked away by bus when the school day ended interracial friendships were difficult to maintain. During the lunch hour gymnasiums and basements served as dining areas, but isolated black students while their white classmates went home for hot meals. Opposition to an all-inclusive lunch plan resulted in a series of excuses that questioned the government’s role in private matters and women’s responsibilities as mothers. True integration required more than racially representative student bodies. Coffin hired black teachers and administrators. He also overhauled the curriculum to include black history and culture.

By the late 1960s, activists in Flint had formally challenged the racial exclusions embedded within community education. However, civil rights groups articulated a critique of de facto segregation that proved to be exculpatory for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the school board. Widespread belief in the myth of de facto segregation resulted in a delayed response to the board’s long record of policy-driven segregation. Indeed, Flint activists waited until 1975 to file their first of two unsuccessful lawsuits against the Flint Board of Education. In the absence of judicial remedies, local activists pinned their hopes for school desegregation on open housing and federal enforcement of the 1964 Civil Right Act, which arrived in 1975. Shortly after the federal government ordered the desegregation of Flint’s schools, the Mott Foundation withdrew its support for community education and shifted its financial resources toward the city’s downtown renewal efforts. Nevertheless, the school board continued to champion the neighborhood schools policies that had kept pupils segregated. In the end, board members agreed only to a weak plan that relied upon magnet schools and other forms of voluntary desegregation. As was the case in other cities, Flint’s voluntary desegregation program proved to be unsuccessful.

This chapter provides a review of the important events that led to the enactment of the Act, including the constraints in realizing the universalization of elementary education, the large number of students left outside the school system, judicial pronouncements by the Supreme Court of India, and the amendments made to the Indian Constitution. It provides a critical assessment of the adequacy of the law with reference to definition of child; disadvantaged groups; neighbourhood schools; norms and standards for a school; curriculum and completion of elementary education; duties of appropriate government, local authority and parents; responsibility of schools and teachers; management of the affairs of the school through School Management Committees; and protection of rights of children. It also analyses the constraints, which have held up the implementation of the Act.

This chapter focuses on public school assignments in Wake County, North Carolina. It begins by highlighting the importance of education as a placement mechanism in our society, as well as the importance of diversity in school assignments for promoting upward mobility. It then introduces social capital theory and examines how various types of social capital, including bridging, bonding, norms, and trust, operate within families and among families, schools, and communities. The chapter describes two models of public school assignment: one based on neighborhood schools, the other based on diversity. It demonstrates how heterogeneity in public school assignments and reliance on neighborhood schools relate to social capital in different ways. It also provides basic information on the size and geography of Wake County, which play a role in the county's school assignment policy change.

In this chapter, the local situations of Birmingham and London are analysed. Although these were the two conurbations accommodating by far the largest number of immigrant children, they were reluctant to introduce dispersal. In Birmingham, some key Labour figures (Denis Howell, Roy Hattersley) campaigned actively in favour of it, and were dissatisfied when the city refused to operate it, afraid as it was of its detrimental effects. There, dispersal was a major bone of contention, until a voluntary type of dispersal was finally decided upon, which proved ineffective against ethnic-minority clustering in schools. In the Inner London Education Authority, dispersal was more massively rejected, mostly owing to a neighbourhood-school-based approach and to the specific resources London enjoyed. Lastly, this chapter studies the debate on the introduction of ‘banding’ in Haringey, which was presented as an IQ-based type of dispersal. This caused a major controversy after Alderman Doulton locally suggested West Indians had lower IQs than autochthonous pupils.