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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.

Between the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and Supreme Court decisions in 1991 and 1992, civil rights laws and policies, especially those affecting schools, have undergone dramatic transformations and fluctuations. After the elegantly straightforward but unprecedented principles propounded in Brown, which have not been seriously challenged in their application to schools, the Court entered what might be called the conceptual swamp of remedy. In a series of major school desegregation decisions during the 1970s, the Supreme Court grappled with a host of complex legal issues involving the definition of desegregation, the nature of remedies, the obligations of school districts, and the remedial powers of the lower courts. The period was marked by divided Supreme Court panels; conflict among numerous lower courts; intense debate among political groups, legal scholars, and social scientists; and heated controversy—and sometimes violence—in affected communities. These battles and disputes were not over the basic principles of Brown but over how school segregation should be remedied. In view of the difficult and often emotional questions involved, it is not surprising that the evolution of school desegregation law has followed a tortuous and convoluted path. Given the basic constitutional principle of nonracial classifications promulgated by Brown and related cases, there was little indication that the principle would be turned on its head in 1968 by Green v. New Kent County and the concept of affirmative integration and, even more explicitly, by the 1971 decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which fostered policies of racial balance and racial quotas—in effect, a race-conscious policy of forced integration. In 1973 many people were surprised, if not shocked, when the Supreme Court applied the Swann concepts of mandatory busing and racial balance to northern school systems, most of which never had the statemandated “dual” school systems of the South (Keyes v. Denver). Then, when mandatory busing appeared likely to become commonplace and permanent throughout the country, the 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley severely restricted remedies by excluding the white suburbs surrounding the predominantly black Detroit schools.

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.

Despite nearly four decades of controversy and debate over school segregation, the desegregation dilemma is still largely unresolved. The “busing” problem has received less national attention in recent years, and there are no riots, bus burnings, and school boycotts, as witnessed in earlier decades. Yet current events reveal the depth of a dilemma that has divided educators, parents, jurists, social scientists, and many other groups since the beginning of the civil rights movement. Indicators of the current desegregation dilemma are numerous. Hundreds of school districts throughout the country still impose busing for desegregation purposes, many under court orders that are now more than twenty years old. Although the types of desegregation plans have evolved to some extent, with increased emphasis on school choice, many plans still compel children to attend schools that their parents would not choose, solely for the purpose of racial “balance.” Further, after a period of quiescence, school desegregation was again the subject of several major Supreme Court decisions in 1991 and 1992. The decisions affected the length of time and the conditions under which a school district has to maintain a court-ordered busing plan. Although these decisions dispelled a common misconception that school systems have to maintain desegregation plans “in perpetuity,” it is still unclear how many school districts can or will end their busing plans. Finally, new desegregation litigation and controversies continue to surface. In 1989 a lawsuit was initiated in a Connecticut state court by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to compel desegregation between the city of Hartford and its suburban districts. A similar city suburbs desegregation strategy failed in the federal courts, but the Hartford lawsuit seeks to build on the success of school equal-finance cases under state constitutions. In 1991 the school board of La Crosse, Wisconsin, adopted a busing plan to equalize economic (rather than race) differences among schools. Reminiscent of the busing controversies of the 1970s, all board members who supported the busing plan were voted out of office in a regular and a recall election, reflecting the widespread community opposition to busing for the purpose of achieving socioeconomic balance in schools.

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.

ALL OF THE REFORMS DISCUSSED SO FAR seek to promote the individual and collective goals of education by improving public schooling—making schools and classrooms more racially integrated, more equitably funded, more academically challenging, more focused on student learning. The most vehement critics of public education, however, look at the forty-year history of reform in this country and conclude that pursuit of the American dream through public schooling is bound to fail. They believe that the current system of public education exists for the adults who work in it and eats money, that the public has invested more than enough time and resources in trying to make the system work and should try another approach. In the words of a mother and choice advocate from New Hampshire, the public system is about “Power and money! The public school system is a powerful monopoly. The people running this monopoly fear change. They fear the resulting demise of their power.” To her mind, only by fighting this “chokehold” can we promote collective as well as individual goals of schooling: … If the school system doesn’t live up to our standards, we should have the right to “save” our children. . . . Any child not educated to be the best that he can be is heartbreaking to most parents. Any child not educated to be the best that he can be is of less value to the community he lives in. . . . This is where the concept of “school choice” becomes so important as a civil right…. Advocates of choice believe that public schooling cannot work and dooms poor children. “The combination of monopoly in the public sector, significant profitability for those who serve the monopoly and the unique ability for the wealthy to choose the best schools has translated into a nightmare of predictable results for ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’” says Lisa Keegan, the former superintendent of public instruction in Arizona:… Public education in the United States should be that in which the money necessary for an education follows a child to the school his or her parent determines is best. . . . The nation cannot abide a system that is blatantly unfair in the access it provides its students to excellent education. This battle for the right of all children to access a quality education is the civil rights movement of our time, and it will succeed.

Chapter 5 examines the lives of six madrasa students who graduated from Jami‘a Nur. This chapter was written collaboratively with Sumbul Farah, an anthropologist, who interviewed the students extensively. The overall conclusion of the chapter (a modified version of which appeared as an article in Modern Asian Studies) is that the madrasa succeeds in its mission of inculcating lifelong piety in its students because of the continuity between school and home. The madrasa becomes a new locus of affective ties for students, as it seeks to inculcate values congruent with those of the home and community at large. The chapter reflects on the mapping of religious self-formation onto South Asian norms of feminine behaviour (the concept of being naram, or soft and malleable) and addresses broader issues of madrasa education for Muslim girls in India.

THE AMERICAN DREAM IS A POWERFUL CONCEPT. It encourages each person who lives in the United States to pursue success, and it creates the framework within which everyone can do it. It holds each person responsible for achieving his or her own dreams, while generating shared values and behaviors needed to persuade Americans that they have a real chance to achieve them. It holds out a vision of both individual success and the collective good of all. From the perspective of the individual, the ideology is as compelling as it is simple. “I am an American, so I have the freedom and opportunity to make whatever I want of my life. I can succeed by working hard and using my talents; if I fail, it will be my own fault. Success is honorable, and failure is not. In order to make sure that my children and grandchildren have the same freedom and opportunities that I do, I have a responsibility to be a good citizen— to respect those whose vision of success is different from my own, to help make sure that everyone has an equal chance to succeed, to participate in the democratic process, and to teach my children to be proud of this country.” Not all residents of the United States believe all of those things, of course, and some believe none of them. Nevertheless, this American dream is surprisingly close to what most Americans have believed through most of recent American history. Public schools are where it is all supposed to start—they are the central institutions for bringing both parts of the dream into practice. Americans expect schools not only to help students reach their potential as individuals but also to make them good citizens who will maintain the nation’s values and institutions, help them flourish, and pass them on to the next generation. The American public widely endorses both of these broad goals, values public education, and supports it with an extraordinary level of resources. Despite this consensus Americans disagree intensely about the education policies that will best help us achieve this dual goal. In recent years disputes over educational issues have involved all the branches and levels of government and have affected millions of students. The controversies—over matters like school funding, vouchers, bilingual education, high-stakes testing, desegregation, and creationism—seem, at first glance, to be separate problems.