Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, And The Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ryan, James E. (James Edward)

Contributor:

GIC Course Text Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Education.

Local Subjects:

Education.

Summary:

How is it that, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones? In Five Miles Away, A World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia-one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day. The Supreme Court, in accord with the wishes of the Nixon administration, allowed the suburbs to lock nonresidents out of their school systems. City schools, whose student bodies were becoming increasingly poor and black, simply received more funding, a measure that has proven largely ineffective. Ryan explains why all the major education reforms since the 1970s-including school finance litigation, school choice, and No Child Left Behind-have failed to bridge the gap between urban and suburban schools and have instead entrenched segregation by race and class. As long as that segregation continues, Ryan forcefully argues, so too will educational inequality. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Five Miles Away, A World Apart tits together, like no other book, a half-century's worth of education law and politics into a coherent, if disturbing, whole. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Past: School Desegregation and Middle America

Chapter 1 Buying Time 21

Chapter 2 Don't Cross That Line 63

Part II Present: Save the Cities, Spare the Suburbs

Chapter 3 Desegregating Dollars 121

Chapter 4 Like a Russian Novel: School Finance Litigation in State Courts 145

Chapter 5 Limited Choices 181

Chapter 6 The Impact of Choice and the Role of Courts 215

Chapter 7 Lowering the Bar: The Standards and Testing Movement 239

Part III Future: Demography Is Opportunity

Chapter 8 In Search of Ties That Bind 271.

ISBN:

9780199836857