Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits

Please join Ansley Erickson and guests on Monday, September 26 from 4-5:30pm for a discussion of Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (University of Chicago Press, 2016). 

The book "presents a broad, detailed, and damning argument about the inextricable interrelatedness of school policies and the persistence of metropolitan-scale inequality. While many accounts of education in urban and metropolitan contexts describe schools as the victims of forces beyond their control, Erickson shows the many ways that schools have been intertwined with these forces and have in fact—via land-use decisions, curricula, and other tools—helped sustain inequality.

Taking Nashville as her focus, Erickson uncovers the hidden policy choices that have until now been missing from popular and legal narratives of inequality. In her account, inequality emerges not only from individual racism and white communities’ resistance to desegregation, but as the result of long-standing linkages between schooling, property markets, labor markets, and the pursuit of economic growth. By making visible the full scope of the forces invested in and reinforcing inequality, Erickson reveals the complex history of, and broad culpability for, ongoing struggles in our schools." (from the Publisher's Description)

Ansley T. Erickson is an Assistant Professor of History and Education, and an affiliated faculty member at the Institute for Urban and Minority Education and the Columbia University Department of History. She currently serves on the editorial board of the History of Education Quarterly and Theory and Research in Education. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation, and the Eisenhower Institute. She and co-author Andrew Highsmith won the 2016 History of Education Prize for best essay in the field. 

Respondents include Carla Shedd, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, and author of Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice; Jeanne Theoharis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College, and author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks; and Jose Vilson, Eighth Grade Math Teacher, Founder of EduColor, and author of This is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education.

This book talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Arts and Humanities, Institute for Urban and Minority Education, and the Center on History and Education.

Please rsvp by Friday, September 23rd.